fter _Helen_ had passed through the press, Miss Edgeworth accompanied
her friends Sir Culling and Lady Smith in a trip through Connemara. Of
the adventures they had on this journey--real Irish adventures, with
innumerable sloughs to traverse, with roads that imperilled life, with
inns whose dirt and discomfort passed belief, with roadside hospitality
from kindly but eccentric gentlefolks--Miss Edgeworth wrote a letter
some forty pages long to a brother in India. For fun and graphic
vivacity it is not surpassed by the best of her printed Irish scenes.
After her return "rents and odious accounts" kept her mind from running
too much upon _Helen_, about which she was more anxious than about any
book she had ever sent into the world. It soon proved as great a success
as her earlier works, and a second edition was demanded after a few
weeks. Her own feelings about the matter are expressed in a letter she
wrote to Mr. Bannatyne, who had congratulated her on its public
reception:--

MY DEAR MR. BANNATYNE:

I thank you with all my heart for the "nervousness" you felt about
my venturing again before the public, and it is a _heart_-felt as
well as a _head_-felt satisfaction to me that you do not think I
have lowered what my father took such pains to raise for me. You
cannot conceive how much afraid I was myself to venture what had
not his corrections and his sanction. For many, many years that
feeling deterred me from any attempt in this line. Of what
consequence, then, to my happiness it is to be assured, by friends
on whose sincerity and judgment I can depend, that I have not done
what I ought to repent or to be ashamed of.

Concerning _Helen_ contemporary public opinion was much divided; some
regarded it as a falling-off in power, others as an advance, but all
agreed that there was a change. The change is one of tone and feeling,
induced in part, no doubt, by the fact that it was the emanation of her
own brain only; in part that years had caused Miss Edgeworth, as it
causes all of us, to regard life from a different standpoint. Experience
had taught her to

Gentler scan her brother man

than she did in earlier life. _Helen_ is so much superior in ease,
nature and poetry, that it makes us deplore that Miss Edgeworth's
talents had not been allowed unchecked sway. Not only is the fable more
skillfully framed, but the whole shows greater passion and finer insight
into