tted the i's, interpolated, expurgated,
to his own and Maria's satisfaction. She was essentially a modest woman;
she gratefully accepted his criticism and emendations. Mr. Clark Russell
quotes Sydney Smith, who declared that Mr. Edgeworth must have written
or burst. 'A discharge of ink was an evacuation absolutely necessary
to avoid fatal and plethoric congestion.' The only wonder is that,
considering all they went through, his daughter's stories survived to
tell their tale, and to tell it so well, with directness and conviction,
that best of salt in any literary work. A letter Maria wrote to her
cousin will be remembered. 'I beg, dear Sophy,' she says, 'that you will
not call my stories by the sublime name of my works; I shall else be
ashamed when the little mouse comes forth.'

Maria's correspondence is delightful, and conveys us right away into
that bygone age. The figures rapidly move across her scene, talking and
unconsciously describing themselves as they go; you see them all through
the eyes of the observant little lady. She did not go very deep; she
seems to me to have made kindly acquaintance with some, to have admired
others with artless enthusiasm. I don't think she troubled herself much
about complication of feeling; she liked people to make repartees, or
to invent machines, to pay their bills, and to do their duty in a
commonplace and cheerfully stoical fashion. But then Maria Edgeworth
certainly did not belong to our modern schools, sipping the emetic
goblet to give flavour to daily events, nor to that still more alarming
and spreading clique of DEGENERES who insist upon administering such
doses to others to relieve the tedium of the road of life.

Perhaps we in our time scarcely do justice to Miss Edgeworth's
extraordinary cleverness and brightness of apprehension. There is more
fun than humour in her work, and those were the days of good rollicking
jokes and laughter. Details change so quickly that it is almost
impossible to grasp entirely the aims and intentions of a whole set of
people just a little different from ourselves in every single thing; who
held their heads differently, who pointed their toes differently, who
addressed each other in a language just a little unlike our own. The
very meanings of the words shift from one generation to another, and
we are perhaps more really in harmony with our great-great-grandfathers
than with the more immediate generations.

Her society was charming, so ever