who had known and loved him;
and though Mrs. Ruxton had gone through the manuscript, it was a
satisfaction to her to hear that on seeing the work in print she had not
altered her views on it. She wrote:--

The irremediable words once past the press, I knew that the
happiness of my life was at stake. Even if all the rest of the
world had praised it and you had been dissatisfied, how miserable I
should have been!

The world was not so lenient in its criticism. It failed to see what
right the work had to exist; it acquiesced in what Miss Edgeworth had
felt, that she of all persons was the least fitted to be the biographer
of the man she so blindly adored.

The first volume is entirely Mr. Edgeworth's own writing, the second is
hers; she takes up the narrative on his final removal to Ireland.
Although written in his heavy-footed, stilted style, that broke forth
now and again into comic pomposity, of the two his is the more
entertaining, for he tells many stories that do not concern himself
alone. Thus, though he is by no means a graphic writer, we can gather
from his pages some notion of the little provincial Mutual Admiration
Society that was gathered together at Lichfield under the aegis of Dr.
Darwin; of the nature of society in Ireland during his youth; of the
state of mechanical science in England. But there is also much that is
puerile, some few things that are in bad taste; and the book contains,
besides, some really careless blunders with regard to events for which
the data were within the reach of all. In Miss Edgeworth's portion it is
easily seen that she does not write freely. Even her style, usually
more flexible and spontaneous, has caught a reflection from his, while
the position in which she stood to the object of her work hindered her
from exercising that keen, critical judgment which she possessed, and
which would certainly have come to the fore had the subject of her work
been a stranger to her. Only while writing about such events as do not
immediately deal with her father is she herself. Probably the very
anxiety she felt regarding the book was a dim, unformulated
consciousness that she had not made it all she desired. The press spoke
but coolly. The _Quarterly Review_ published a somewhat savage article;
indeed, with so much bitterness was it written, that though one is at
all times inclined to deprecate the theory of personal enmity, so dear
to the wounded vanity of authors, it d