cture of the varieties of recklessness and misconduct which
in the course of a generation or two ruined or crippled most of the
landlords of Ireland; _Belinda_ (1803), her most ambitious and elaborate
if not her most successful effort, which includes a very vivid and
pregnant sketch of the feminine dissipation of the end of the last
century; _Tales of Fashionable Life_, including the admirable
_Absentee_; and _Ormond_, the most vivid of her Irish stories next to
_Castle Rackrent_. She continued to write novels as late as 1834
(_Helen_), while some very charming letters of hers, though privately
printed a good many years ago, were not published till 1894. Miss
Edgeworth's father, Richard, was himself something of a man of letters,
and belonged to the class of Englishmen who, without imbibing French
freethinking, had eagerly embraced the "utility" doctrines, the
political economy, and some of the educational and social crazes of the
French _philosophes_; and he did his daughter no good by thrusting into
her earlier work a strain of his own crotchet and purpose. Indirectly,
however, this brought about in _The Parent's Assistant_, in other books
for children, and in the _Moral Tales_, some of her most delightful
work. In the novels (which besides these mentioned include _Leonora_,
_Harrington_, _Ennui_, and _Patronage_, the longest of all) Miss
Edgeworth occupies a kind of middle position between the eighteenth
century novelists, of whom Miss Burney is the last, and those of the
nineteenth, of whom Miss Austen is the first. This is not merely,
though no doubt it is partly, due to the fact that the society which she
saw (and she mixed in a great deal, from the highest downwards) was
itself in a kind of transition state: it was at least as much owing to a
certain want of distinct modernness and distinct universality in her own
character, thought, and style. Miss Edgeworth, though possessed of
delightful talents falling little short of genius, and of much humour
(which last is shown in the charming _Essay on Irish Bulls_, as well as
in her novels and her letters), missed, as a rule, the last and greatest
touches; and, except some of her Irish characters, who are rather types
than individuals, she has not created many live persons, while sometimes
she wanders very far from life. Her touch, in short, though extremely
pleasant, was rather uncertain. She can tell a story to perfection, but
does not often invent it perfectly; and by