ed. He saw that in order to prevent
precepts from tiring the eye and mind, it was necessary to make the
stories in which they were introduced dramatic, to keep alive hope, fear
and curiosity by some degree of intricacy.

Admirably did his daughter carry out the precepts he thus laid down. It
was Miss Edgeworth who really inaugurated for England the reign of
didactic fiction. Though never losing sight of her aim, she also never
lost sight of the amusement of her young readers. She rightly
comprehended that only by captivating their senses could she conquer and
influence their reason. Her children's tales, written with motion and
spirit, were told in the simple language of the young. She went straight
to the hearts of her little readers because they could understand her;
they needed no grown person to explain to them sesquipedalian words.
There is a freshness about her stories that children are quick to
respond to, and it arises from the fact that the children she depicts
for her readers are real. Miss Edgeworth knew what children were like;
she saw them not only from without but from within; she had lived all
her life among little people. Their world never became a paradise from
which she was shut out. The advantages she thus enjoyed were as rare as
they are important for the due comprehension of the needs of childhood,
and she utilized them to the utmost. The chief charm of her tales, that
which makes them _sui generis_ both now and then, is that she not only
wrote in the language of children, but, what is even rarer, from the
child's point of view.

There are yet among us those who owe their earliest pleasures to Miss
Edgeworth, and if of late she has been somewhat jostled out of the
nursery and school-room because it is the tendency of the modern child
to revolt against all attempts to teach it unawares, we are far from
sure that the change is wholly for the better. It was a just perception
of this that caused Miss Yonge to say in _The Stokesley Secret_ that her
heroes "would read any books that made no pretensions to be instructive,
but even a fact about a lion or an elephant made them detect wisdom in
disguise, and throw it aside." The modern child finds, it is said, Miss
Edgeworth's tales dry; American books of a semi-novelistic character,
rattling stories of wild adventure, are preferred.

This may be so, but we cannot help thinking that, just in these days,
when the ethical standard held up to children is not t