In Miss Edgeworth’s own stories the didactic purpose is only veiled by the sprightliness of the narrative and the air of amusing reality she never fails to impart. Who that has ever read them can forget Harry and Lucy making up their own little beds in the morning, and knocking down the unbaked bricks to prove that they were soft; or Rosamond choosing between the famous purple jar and a pair of new boots; or Laura forever drawing the furniture in perspective? In all these little people say and do there is conveyed to the young reader a distinct moral lesson, which we are by no means inclined to reject, when we turn to the other writers of the time and see how much worse off we are. Day, in Sandford and Merton, holds up for our edification the dreariest and most insufferable of pedagogues, and advocates a mode of life wholly at variance with the instincts and habits of his age. Miss Sewell, in her Principles of Education, sternly warns young girls against the sin of chattering with each other, and forbids mothers’ playing with their children as a piece of frivolity which cannot fail to weaken the dignity of their position. To a great many parents, both in England and in France, such advice would have been unnecessary. Who, for instance, can imagine Lady Balcarras, with whom it was a word and a blow in quick succession, stooping to any such weakness; or that august mother of Harriet Martineau, against whom her daughter has recorded all the slights and severities of her youth? Not that we think Miss Martineau to have been much worse off than other children of her day; but as she has chosen with signal ill-taste to revenge herself upon her family in her autobiography, we have at least a better opportunity of knowing all about it. “To one person,” she writes, “I was indeed habitually untruthful, from fear. To my mother I would in my childhood assert or deny anything that would bring me through most easily,”--a confession which, to say the least, reflects as little to her own credit as to her parent’s. Had Mrs. Martineau been as stern an upholder of the truth as was Mrs. Wesley, her daughter would have ventured upon very few fabrications in her presence. When she tells us gravely how often she meditated suicide in these early days, we are fain to smile at hearing a fancy so common among morbid and imaginative children narrated soberly in middle life, as though it were a unique and horrible experience. No one endowed by nature with so copious a fund of self-sympathy could ever have stood in need of much pity from the outside world.