seems, means in Irish “sweet voice,” if Lady Morgan is to be trusted in rebus Celticis.  It is to be hoped she is:  for the novel is a sort of macedoine of Irish history, folk-lore, scenery, and what not, done up in a syrup of love-making quant. suff. Its author wrote many more novels and became a butt for both good- and ill-natured satire with the comic writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties.  The title was actually borrowed by Maturin in The Wild Irish “Boy,” and it is fair to say that the book preceded Scott’s, though not Miss Edgeworth’s, experiments in the line of the “national” novel.  The earlier Reviewers were discreditably savage on women-writers, and Lady Morgan had her share of their truculence.  She did not wholly deserve it:  but it must be said that nothing she wrote can really be ranked as literature, save on the most indiscriminate and uncritical estimate.  It is, however, difficult to see much harm in her.

Ida of Athens, for instance, which shocked contemporaries, and which, by the way, has the very large first title of Woman, could only bring a blush to cheeks very tickle of that sere:  a yawn might come much more easily.  The most shocking thing that the heroine, who is “an attempt to delineate woman in her natural state,” does (and that not of malice) is to receive her lover in a natural bathroom.  But her adventures are told in a style which is the oddest compound of Romantesque and Johnsonese.  ("The hour was ardent.  The bath was cool. He calculated upon the probable necessity of its enjoyment.”) The spirit is the silliest and most ignorant Philhellenism—­all the beauty, virtue, wisdom, of the ancient Greeks being supposed to be inherited by their mongrel successors of the early nineteenth century.  An English and a Turkish lover dispute Ida’s affection or possession.  There are the elaborate pseudo-erudite notes which one has learnt to associate chiefly with Moore.  The authoress boasts in her preface that she “has already written almost as many volumes as she has years,” and that she has hardly ever corrected her proofs.  Perhaps this silliness will make some think her not more an example of the savagery of contemporary criticism than a justification thereof.

It was in fact not only brutal man who objected to the preposterous excesses of pseudo-romance:  and serious or jocular parables were taken up against it, if not before Northanger Abbey was written, long before it was published.  In 1810 a certain “G.” or “S.G.,” whose full name was Sarah Green, wrote, besides some actual history and an attempt at the historical novel, a very curious and rather hybrid book entitled Romance Readers and Romance Writers.  Its preface is an instance of “Women, beware Women,” for though it stigmatises male creatures, such as a certain Curteis and a certain Pickersgill, it treats Lady Morgan (then only Sydney Owenson) and “Rosa Matilda” even more roughly and asks (as has been asked about