_Fredolpho_) were less fortunate. He also
published sermons; but he lives in literature only by his novels, and
not very securely by these. He produced three of them--_The Fatal
Vengeance: or, The Family of Montorio_, _The Wild Irish Boy_, and the
_Milesian Chief_--under a pseudonym before he was thirty; while after
the success of _Bertram_ he avowed _Women_ (1818), _Melmoth the
Wanderer_ (1820), and _The Albigenses_ (1824), the last in a sort of
cross style between his earlier patterns and Scott. But his fame had
best be allowed to rest wholly on _Melmoth_, a remarkable book dealing
with the supposed selling of a soul to the devil in return for prolonged
life; the bargain, however, being terminable if the seller can induce
some one else to take it off his hands. Although far too long,
marvellously involved with tales within tales, and disfigured in parts
by the rant and the gush of its class, _Melmoth_ is really a powerful
book, which gave something more than a passing shudder to its own
generation (it specially influenced Balzac), and which has not lost its
force even now. But the usual novel of this kind, which was written in
vast numbers, was simply beneath contempt.

The exquisite artist who, as mentioned formerly, had taken these tales
of terror as part subject of her youthful satire, had begun to write
some years before the close of the eighteenth century. But Miss Austen's
books were long withheld from the press, and she was considerably
preceded in publication by Maria Edgeworth. These last are the only
novels of the first decade of the nineteenth century which have held any
ground, though they were but few among the crowds not merely of tales of
terror but of fashionable novels, "Minerva Press" inanities, attempts
in the bastard and unsuccessful kind of historical romance which
preceded Scott's, and others. Miss Edgeworth, who was born in 1767, the
daughter of an eccentric busybody of good family and property in
Ireland, and who lived till 1848, had a great fame in her own day,
deserved it, never entirely lost it, and has lately had it revived;
while Scott declared (but in such matters Scott was a little apt to let
his good-nature and his freedom from personal vanity get the better of
strict critical truth) that her Irish novels had supplied the suggestion
of his Scotch ones. Her chief works in this kind were _Castle Rackrent_
(1801), a book with little interest of the strictly "novel" kind, but a
wonderful pi