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Rh Trivia, and if you have time, will you humour your niece so far as to look at it? I had much rather make a bargain with anyone I loved to read the same book with them at the same hour, than to look at the moon like Rousseau's famous lovers. “Ah ! that is because my dear niece has no taste and no eyes.” But I assure you I am learning the use of my eyes main fast, and make no doubt, please Heaven I live to be sixty, to see as well as my neighbours. I am scratching away very hard at the Freeman Family.

That Miss Edgeworth was not affected by the current sentimentalism of the period the above remark shows. Indeed, her earliest letters evince her practical straight-forward common-sense. Romance had no place in her nature. In 1794 she was engaged upon her Letters to Literary Ladies. She wrote to her cousin:

The arts of peace, as she herself expresses it, were going on prosperously side by side with those of war; the disturbances, of which Miss Edgeworth continues to write quite lightly, having become sufficiently serious to require military intervention.

In 1795 the Letters to Literary Ladies were published. Considering the time when the work was written it showed much independence and advance of thought, though to-day it would be stigmatised as somewhat retrograde. It is nothing more than a plea in favour of female education, repeating arguments that of late years have been well-worn, and of which