d me with skill, and let me recover slowly, as nature
requires at advanced age. I am obliged to repeat myself, "advanced
age," because really and truly neither my spirits nor my powers of
locomotion and facility of running up and down stairs would put me
in mind of it. I do not find either my love for my friends or my
love of literature in the least failing. I enjoyed, even when
flattest in my bed, hearing Harriet Butler reading to me till
eleven o'clock at night.

Her interest in the current literature was sustained; and though she had
little sympathy with the romantic school of poetry and fiction that had
arisen, her criticisms were both fair and acute. Of the modern French
writers she said:--

All the fashionable French novelists will soon be reduced to
advertising for a _new vice_, instead of, like the Roman Emperor,
simply for a new pleasure. It seems to me with the Parisian
novelists a first principle now that there is no pleasure without
vice, and no vice without pleasure, but that the Old World vices
having been exhausted, they must strain their genius to invent new;
and so they do, in the most wonderful and approved bad manner, if I
may judge from the few specimens I have looked at.

_Henrietta Temple_ she condemns as "trash," "morally proving that who
does wrong should be rewarded with love and fortune." Indeed, so eager
was she over books, so ardently did she still enter into all adventures
and details, that when she was ill her doctor found it needful to
prescribe that her reading must be confined to some old, well-known
work, or else something that should entertain and interest her without
over-exciting her or straining her attention.

During the whole of 1846 the long illness and death of her brother
Francis absorbed all Miss Edgeworth's interest. Next year came the
terrible potato famine. She strained every nerve to help the sufferers;
her time, her thoughts, her purse, her whole strength, were devoted to
the poor. She could hardly feel or think on any other theme; plans to
relieve the distress, petitions for aid, filled her letters. She even
turned her attention once more to writing, in order to get more money
for her starving countrymen. The result was _Orlandino_, a tale for
children, relating the fortunes and reformation of a graceless truant.
It was the last work she published--her literary career thus ending, as
it began,