There are few more curious and interesting personages in the history of the English Novel than Maria Edgeworth.  The variety of her accomplishment in the kind was extraordinary:  and in more than one of its species she went very near perfection.  One is never quite certain whether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father Richard—­one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists and clever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by the Revolutionary period—­did her more harm than good.  It certainly loaded her work with superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism:  but it might be contended that, without its stimulus, she would have done much less, perhaps nothing.  As it was, she lived for more than eighty years (till all but the middle of the nineteenth century) and wrote for more than sixty.  Her work is thus very bulky:  but it may be considered, for our present purpose, in three groups—­her short stories written mainly but not wholly for children; her regular novels; and her Irish studies.  Of these the middle division has been, and no doubt has deserved to be, the least popular:  but its principal example, Belinda (1801) (Patronage, a longer and later book, and others are inferior), is considerably better than is usually admitted and, by its early date, deserves special notice here.  It preceded Miss Austen’s work in publication, and is specially cited by her as a capital example of novel in connection with the work of Miss Burney:  and it is evidently founded on study of the latter, of which, indeed, it is the first really worthy continuation.  Maria has nothing so good as Fanny’s Smiths and Branghtons:  but the whole book is far superior to Evelina.  The extravagance of the fin-de-siecle society which it represents has probably disguised from not a few readers who do not know the facts, the other fact that it is a real attempt at realist observation of manners:  and it has the narrative merit which was Miss Edgeworth’s gift of nature.  But the hero is patchy and improbable:  the heroine, a good and quite possible girl, is not sufficiently “reliefed out”; and the most important figures of the book, Lord and Lady Delacour, almost great successes, are not helped by the peculiar academic-didactic moralising which she had caught from Marmontel.

The following of that ingenious and now too much under-valued writer stood her in better stead in the Moral Tales (1801) (which she deliberately called after his[16]), the Popular Tales of the same kind, and (though Marmontel did not intentionally write for children) the delightful Parent’s Assistant (1801) and Frank.  In the two first-named divisions, the narrative faculty just mentioned appears admirably, together with another and still greater gift, that of character-painting, and even a grasp of literary and social satire, which might not be anticipated from some of her other books.  The French governess