Page:Maria Edgeworth (Zimmern 1883).djvu/134

122 out to be a Christian. Yet she was good enough to accept it as a peace-offering, and to consider that this was an Irish blunder, which, with the best intentions, I could not avoid."

Contemporary opinion certainly treated Harrington as not one of the happiest of their favourite novelist's stories. Yet, with all its palpable defects, there is such an admixture of excellence, that Harrington should not be left unread, even though we may regret that such capital figures, painted with such nice skill and delicate discrimination, should be imbedded in so puerile a tale. The characters are keenly and lightly drawn, standing out boldly and clearly. The jargon of society is once more successfully reproduced, as well as those fashionable ladies who hide the claws of a tigress under a velvet paw, and whose complex and shifting nature Miss Edgeworth understood so well and reproduced so faithfully. How she, with her simple direct character, came to comprehend them so fully, is almost a marvel. But intuition of character was a forte with Miss Edgeworth, and the grand secret of her novelistic success. Her truth of touch was remarkable. Lady Anne Mowbray is a perfect model of that mixture of feline grace and obstinate silliness which the world so much admires in its young ladies ; while her mother's insignificance, which is not disguised by a stately formal manner, is delineated and sustained to perfection. Lord Mowbray is yet another of Miss Edgeworth's marvellously acute portraits of a true man of the world, of an evil nature. This is concealed by a fair semblance and good manners, so that it is needful to know him well to guess at the villain that is hidden under this attractive disguise.

Miss Edgeworth is at her ease and at her happiest