Page:Maria Edgeworth (Zimmern 1883).djvu/224

212 when flattest in my bed hearing Harriet Butler reading to me till eleven o'clock at night.

Her interest in the current literature was sustained; and though she had little sympathy with the romantic school of poetry and fiction that had arisen, her criticisms were both fair and acute. Of the modern French writers she said:—

All the fashionable French Novelists will soon he reduced to advertising for a new vice, instead of, like the Roman emperor, simply for a now pleasure. It seems to me with the Parisian novelists a first principle now that there is no pleasure without vice, and no vice without pleasure, but that the old world vices having been exhausted they must strain their genius to invent new: and so they do, in the most wonderful and approved had manner, if I may judge from the few specimens I have looked at.

Henrietta Temple she condemns as "trash," "morally proving that who does wrong should be rewarded with love and fortune." Indeed, so eager was she over books, so ardently did she still enter into all adventures and details, that when she was ill her doctor found it needful to prescribe that her reading must be confined to some old well-known work, or else something that should entertain and interest her without over-exciting her or straining her attention.

During the whole of 1846, the long illness and death of her brother Francis absorbed all Miss Edgeworth's interest. Next year came the terrible potato famine. She strained every nerve to help the sufferers; her time, her thoughts, her purse, her whole strength, were devoted to the poor. She could hardly feel or think on any other theme; plans to relieve the distress, petitions for aid, filled her letters. She even turned her attention once more to writing, in order to get more money for her starving countrymen. The result