sometimes can, and make you forget and forgive the virtuous intention.

What was unreal in Miss Edgeworth became mere insincerity in her
contemporary, Lady Morgan. Few people could tell you now where Thackeray
got Miss Glorvina O'Dowd's baptismal name; yet _The Wild Irish Girl_ had
a great triumph in its day, and Glorvina stood sponsor to the milliners'
and haberdashers' inventions ninety years before the apotheosis of
Trilby. _O'Donnell_, which is counted Lady Morgan's best novel, gives a
lively ideal portrait of the authoress, first as the governess-grub,
then transformed by marriage into the butterfly-duchess. But the book is
a thinly-disguised political pamphlet. "Look," she says in effect, "at
the heroic virtues of O'Donnell, the young Irishman, driven to serve in
foreign armies, despoiled of his paternal estates by the penal laws;
look at the fidelity, the simplicity, the native humour (so dramatically
effective) of his servant Rory; and then say if you will not plump for
Catholic Emancipation." "My dear lady," the reader murmurs, "I wondered
why you were so set upon underlining all these things. Can you not tell
us a story frankly, and let us alone with your conclusions?"

Unfortunately, very much the same has to be said of a far greater
writer, William Carleton, even in those tales which are based upon his
own most intimate experience. _The Poor Scholar_, his most popular
story, proceeds directly from an episode in his own life. He had himself
been a poor scholar, had set out from his northern home to walk to
Munster, where the best known schools were, trusting to charity by the
way to lodge him, and to charity to keep him throughout his schooling
for the sake of his vocation, and for the blessing sure to descend upon
those who aided a peasant's son to become a priest. Nothing could be
more vivid than the early scenes, the collection made at the altar for
Jimmy McEvoy, the priest's sermon, the boy's parting from home, and the
roadside hospitality; there is one infinitely touching episode in the
house of the first farmer who shelters him. Then come the school itself,
and the tyranny of its master, till the boy falls sick of a fever, and
is turned out of doors. Then, alas, the conventional intervenes in the
person of the virtuous absentee ignorant of his agent's misdoings: the
long arm of coincidence is stretched to the uttermost; and we have to
wade through pages of discussion upon the relations of landlord and