Page:Maria Edgeworth (Zimmern 1883).djvu/99

Rh thus her fancy, her wit, her strictures are all made to bend to her main purpose, that of being the vehicles of her practical philosophy. Yet to regard Miss Edgeworth as a mere teaching machine is to do her gross injustice. Like most people, she was better than her creed. Despite her doctrines, her genius was too strong for her, and it is thanks to this that sundry of these tales from "Fashionable Life" are among her highest and most successful efforts. They are also as a whole more powerful and varied than any of her previous productions.

The first series consisted of four stories. Ennui, The Dun, Manœuvring, and Almeria," of which the first is by far the longest. As is too often the case with Miss Edgeworth, the plot is clumsily and coldly contrived, the proportions not well maintained ; but the work abounds with masterly delineations of character, and is a striking picture of the satiety induced by being born, like the hero Lord G-lenthorne, on the pinnacle of fortune, so that he has nothing to do but to sit still and enjoy the barrenness of the prospect, or to eat toffee like the Duke in Patience. He tries all amusements but finds them wanting, and he would probably have been ruined mentally and bodily if a convenient catastrophe had not precipitated him temporarily into indigence and aroused all those better qualities of his nature and excellent abilities that lay buried and inert. It is not the least skilful part of this clever tale that it is told as an autobiography, the hero himself both consciously and unconsciously dissecting his foibles. Much of the scene is laid in Ireland, and gives Miss Edgeworth scope for those amusing collateral incidents, those racy delineations of the various classes of Irish society, in which she is