ntity--about her; but she was as good an Irish woman as ever walked,
and there are hundreds of Irish people of her class and creed looking at
Irish life with kindly humorous Irish eyes, seeing pretty much what she
saw, enjoying it as she enjoyed it, but with neither her power nor her
will to set it down. _Castle Rackrent_ is a masterpiece; and had Miss
Edgeworth been constant to the dramatic method which she then struck out
for herself, with all the fine reticences that it involved, her name
might have stood high in literature. Unhappily, her too exemplary father
repressed the artist in her, fostered the pedagogue, and in her later
books she commits herself to an attitude in which she can moralise
explicitly upon the ethical and social bearings of every word and
action. The fine humour in _Ormond_ is obscured by its setting; in
_Castle Rackrent_ the humour shines. Sir Condy and his lady we see none
the less distinctly for seeing them through the eyes of old Thady, the
retainer who narrates the Rackrent history; and in the process we have a
vision of old Thady himself. Now and then the novelist reminds us of her
presence by some extravagantly ironic touch, as when Thady describes Sir
Condy's anger with the Government "about a place that was promised him
and never given, after his supporting them against his conscience very
honourably and being greatly abused for, he having the name of a great
patriot in the country." Thady would hardly have been so ingenuous as
that. But for the most part the humour is truly inherent in the
situation, and you might look far for a better passage than the
description of Sir Condy's parting with his lady. But it is better to
illustrate from a scene perhaps less genuinely humorous, but more
professedly so--Sir Condy's wake. Miss Edgeworth does not dwell on the
broad farce of the entertainment; she does not make Thady eloquent over
the whisky that was drunk and the fighting that began and so forth, as
Lever or Carleton would certainly have been inclined to do. She fixes on
the central comedy of the situation, Sir Condy's innocent vanity and its
pitiable disappointment--is it necessary to recall that he had arranged
for the wake himself, because he always wanted to see his own funeral?
Poor Sir Condy!--even Thady, who was in the secret, had forgotten all
about him, when he was startled by the sound of his master's voice from
under the greatcoats thrown all atop.

"'Thady,' says he, 'I've h