The works of the very beautifully named Regina Maria Roche should probably be read, as they were for generations, in late childhood or early youth.  Even then an intelligent boy or girl would perceive some of the absurdity, but might catch a charm that escapes the less receptive oldster.  They were, beyond all question, immensely popular, and continued to be so for a long time:  in fact it is almost sufficient evidence that there is, if I mistake not, in the British Museum no edition earlier than the tenth of the most famous of them, The Children of the Abbey (1798).  This far-renowned work opens with the exclamation of the heroine Amanda, “Hail, sweet sojourn of my infancy!” and we are shortly afterwards informed that in the garden “the part appropriated to vegetables was divided from the part sacred to Flora.”  Otherwise, the substance of the thing is a curious sort of watered-down Richardson, passed through successive filtering beds of Mackenzie, and even of Mrs. Radcliffe.  It is difficult for even the most critical taste to find much savour or stimulus in the resulting liquid.  But, like almost everybody mentioned here, Regina is a document of the demands of readers and the faculty of writers:  and so she “standeth,” if not exactly “crowned,” yet ticketed.

Work—­somewhat later—­of some interest, but not of first-class quality, is to be found in the Discipline (1811) and Self-Control (1814) of Mary Brunton.  A Balfour of Orkney on the father’s side and a Ligonier on the mother’s, the authoress had access to the best English as well as Scottish society, and seems to have had more than a chance of taking a place in the former:  but preferred to marry a minister-professor and settled down to country manse life.  She died in middle age and her husband wrote a memoir of her. Discipline seems to represent a sort of fancy combination of the life she might have led and the life she did lead.  Ellen Percy, the heroine, starts in the highest circles; forgets herself so far as to “waltz_e_” with a noble ne’er-do-weel, thereby earning the “stern disapprobation” of a respectable lover; comes down in the world; has Highland experiences which, at the book’s early date, are noteworthy; marries (like her creatress) a minister; but “retains a little of her coquettish sauciness.”  “Bless her, poor little dear!” one can imagine Thackeray exclaiming in his later and mellowed days.  Mrs. Brunton’s letters breathe a lady-like and not unamiable propriety, and she is altogether a sort of milder, though actually earlier, Miss Ferrier.

Ireland vindicated its claim to comparative liveliness in the work of a better known contemporary and survivor.  Lady Morgan’s (Miss Sydney Owenson’s) Wild Irish Girl (1806) is one of the books whose titles have prolonged for them a kind of shadowy existence.  It is written in letters:  and the most interesting thing about it for some readers now is that the heroine supplied Thackeray with the name Glorvina, which, it