be drilled by an Irish-American; the farmers with their wild land-hunger, bidding secretly against each other for every vacant field; the dispensary doctor, who is always regretting that he has not got a Trinity College degree; the plain girls, who want to go into convents; the pretty girls, who want to get married; and the shopkeepers’ daughters, who want to be thought young ladies.  There is a whole pell-mell of men and women, a complete panorama of provincial life, an absolutely faithful picture of the peasant in his own home.  This note of realism in dealing with national types of character has always been a distinguishing characteristic of Irish fiction, from the days of Miss Edgeworth down to our own days, and it is not difficult to see in Ismay’s Children some traces of the influence of Castle Rack-rent.  I fear, however, that few people read Miss Edgeworth nowadays, though both Scott and Tourgenieff acknowledged their indebtedness to her novels, and her style is always admirable in its clearness and precision.

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Miss Leffler-Arnim’s statement, in a lecture delivered recently at St. Saviour’s Hospital, that ’she had heard of instances where ladies were so determined not to exceed the fashionable measurement that they had actually held on to a cross-bar while their maids fastened the fifteen-inch corset,’ has excited a good deal of incredulity, but there is nothing really improbable in it.  From the sixteenth century to our own day there is hardly any form of torture that has not been inflicted on girls, and endured by women, in obedience to the dictates of an unreasonable and monstrous Fashion.  ’In order to obtain a real Spanish figure,’ says Montaigne, ’what a Gehenna of suffering will not women endure, drawn in and compressed by great coches entering the flesh; nay, sometimes they even die thereof.’  ’A few days after my arrival at school,’ Mrs. Somerville tells us in her memoirs, ’although perfectly straight and well made, I was enclosed in stiff stays, with a steel busk in front; while above my frock, bands drew my shoulders back till the shoulder-blades met.  Then a steel rod with a semicircle, which went under my chin, was clasped to the steel busk in my stays.  In this constrained state I and most of the younger girls had to prepare our lessons’; and in the life of Miss Edgeworth we read that, being sent to a certain fashionable establishment, ’she underwent all the usual tortures of back-boards, iron collars and dumbs, and also (because she was a very tiny person) the unusual one of being hung by the neck to draw out the muscles and increase the growth,’ a signal failure in her case.  Indeed, instances of absolute mutilation and misery are so common in the past that it is unnecessary to multiply them; but it is really sad to think that in our own day a civilised woman can hang on to a cross-bar while her maid laces her waist into a fifteen-inch circle.  To begin with, the waist is not a circle at all, but an oval; nor