s of race" are unhappily still extant. Perhaps
it is partly this fact that makes Miss Edgeworth's Irish tales so fresh
to this day. But only in part; on their own account alone they are
delightful, and _Castle Rackrent_ even more than the rest.

We have Mrs. Barbauld's testimony that Miss Edgeworth wrote _Castle
Rackrent_ unassisted by her father, and judging how infinitely superior
in spontaneity, flexibility, and nervousness of style, force, pith and
boldness, it is to those of her writings with which he meddled, it is
forcibly impressed upon us that Mr. Edgeworth's literary tinkering of
his daughter's works was far from being to their advantage. Her next
published book was her first attempt to deal with the novel proper. In
_Belinda_ she strove to delineate the follies and hollowness of
fashionable life. The heroine is rather a lifeless puppet; but the more
truly prominent figure, Lady Delacour, is drawn with power and keen
intuition. A woman of gay and frivolous antecedents, striving to rise
into a higher atmosphere under the ennobling influences of a pure
friendship, and finding the task a difficult one, was no easy character
to draw or to sustain. Had Lady Delacour died heroically, as Miss
Edgeworth had planned, and as the whole course of the story leads the
reader to expect, the book would have been a success. But to allow her
to recover, to cause her to evolve a reformed character after a type
psychologically impossible to one of her temperament, weakened the force
of the foregoing pages and rendered them untrue. Again, it is on Miss
Edgeworth's spoken testimony to Mrs. Barbauld that we learn that she
meant to make Lady Delacour die, but that it was her father who
suggested the alteration; and since it was a part of the Edgeworthian
creed to believe in such simple and sudden reformations, she accepted
his counsel, to the artistic injury of her tale. It was Mr. Edgeworth,
too, who wrote and interpolated the worthless and high-flown Virginia
episode, in which Clarence Harvey takes to the freak of wife-training
after the pattern of Mr. Day. This incident is quite out of keeping with
the character of Clarence, who is depicted a wooden dandy, but not a
romantic fool. These changes, willingly submitted to by Miss Edgeworth,
who had the most unbounded belief in her father's superior wisdom on all
points whatsoever, also mark his idiosyncracy, for Mr. Edgeworth was a
most rare and curious compound of utilitarianism and w