crifice and devotion. Her heroes are almost as calculating as her
villains.

It is a severe test to which to put an author, to read all his works
consecutively; but it is one that more surely than aught else enables us
to mark his place of merit. If he can stand this trial he is decidedly
above the average; if he issue thence triumphant he may without
hesitation be pronounced among the great. Miss Edgeworth weathers this
test very respectably; indeed it, more than all else, enforces upon the
reader the great versatility she displays in character and situation.
Yet it is just after such a perusal that the absolute lack of the ideal
element is so strongly borne in upon us. As the thirsty mountaineer
drinks eagerly from the first clear streamlet that meets him trickling
down from the heights, so Miss Edgeworth's readers eagerly turn from her
to some more spontaneous writer to quench the drought that this
continuous perusal has engendered. Even in this prosaic and
materialistic age the belief in blue roses is happily not wholly dead;
and though we will not suffer the garden of a novelist to grow no other
plant, because we know that one filled with blue roses only is out of
nature in this terrestrial globe, yet, in a well-ordered parterre, we do
require that the blue rose should also have its place. It is to novelist
and poet that the cultivation of this rare and heaven-born plant has
been entrusted. Miss Edgeworth knew it not. Neither by hereditary
tendency nor by training had she made acquaintance with this
wonder-flower, for whose botanical analysis Mr. Edgeworth would have
searched a Flora in vain, and whose existence he would therefore stoutly
have denied.

With "little stores of maxims," like Tennyson's faithless love, Miss
Edgeworth, acting from the very highest motives, after careful and
philosophic deliberation, at personal suffering to herself, in her
printed words, preached down the instincts of the heart. She knew not
that excellent as utilitarianism is in its place and sphere, there is
something more, something beyond, that is needed to form the basis upon
which human actions are set in motion. For the spiritual and divine
element in man she made no allowance, and it was this that drew down on
her, from shallow contemporary critics, that condemnation of want of
religion, flung in a narrow, dogmatic spirit, that wounded her so
deeply. Outwardly the Edgeworths conformed to the established faith, and
though liber