l sensitiveness
which desires to be consulted. Ireland, though she ought to count
herself amply justified of her children, is still complaining that she
is misunderstood among the nations; she is for ever crying out for
someone to give her keener sympathy, fuller appreciation, and exhibit
herself and her grievances to the world in a true light. The result is
that kind of insincerity and special pleading which has been the curse
of Irish or Anglo-Irish literature. I write of a literature which has
its natural centre in Dublin, not in Connemara; which looks eastward,
not westward. That literature begins with the _Drapier Letters_: it
continues through the great line of orators in whom the Irish genius (we
say nothing of the Celtic) has found its highest expression; and it
produced its first novelist, perhaps also its best, in the unromantic
person of Maria Edgeworth.

Miss Edgeworth had a sound instinct for her art, disfigured though her
later writings are by what Madame de Stael called her _triste utilite_.
Her first story is her most artistic production. _Castle Rackrent_ is
simply a pleasant satire upon the illiterate and improvident gentry who
have always been too common in her country. In this book she holds no
brief; she never stops to preach; her moral is implied, not expressed. A
historian might, it is true, go to _Castle Rackrent_ for information
about the conditions of land tenure as well as about social life in the
Ireland of that day; but the erudition is part and parcel of her story.
Throughout the length and breadth of Ireland, setting aside great towns,
the main interest of life for all classes is the possession of land.
Irish peasants seldom marry for love, they never murder for love; but
they marry and they murder for land. To know something of the
land-question is indispensable for an Irish novelist, and Miss Edgeworth
graduated with honours in this subject. She was her father's agent; when
her brother succeeded to the property she resigned, but in the troubles
of 1830 she was recalled to the management, and saved the estate.
_Castle Rackrent_ is, therefore, like Galt's _Annals of the Parish_, a
historical document; but it is none the worse story for that. The
narrative is put dramatically into the mouth of old Thady, a lifelong
servant of the family. Thady's son, Jason Quirk, attorney and agent to
the estate, has dispossessed the Rackrents; but Thady is still "poor
Thady," and regards the change with ho