Although, by their sub-title, these stories are avowedly composed for children, they are almost as attractive to grown-up readers. This is partly owing to their narrative skill, partly also to the clear characterisation, which already betrays the coming author of _Castle Rackrent_ and _Belinda_ and _Patronage_--the last, under its first name of _The Freeman Family_, being already partly written, although many years were still to pass before it saw the light in 1814. Readers, wise after the event, might fairly claim to have foreseen from some of the personages in the _Parent's Assistant_ that the author, however sedulous to describe "such situations only ... as children can easily imagine," was not able entirely to resist tempting specimens of human nature like the bibulous Mr. Corkscrew, the burglar butler in "The False Key," or Mrs. Pomfret, the housekeeper of the same story, whose prejudices against the _Villaintropic_ Society, and its unholy dealing with the "_drugs and refuges_" of humanity, are quite in the style of the Mrs. Slipslop of a great artist whose works one would scarcely have expected to encounter among the paper-backed and grey-boarded volumes which lined the shelves at Edgeworthstown. Mrs. Theresa Tattle, again, in "The Mimic," is a type which requires but little to fit it for a subordinate part in a novel, as is also Lady Diana Sweepstakes in "Waste not, Want not." In more than one case, we seem to detect an actual portrait. Mr. Somerville of Somerville ("The White Pigeon"), to whom that "little town" belonged,--who had done so much "to inspire his tenantry with a taste for order and domestic happiness, and took every means in his power to encourage industrious, well-behaved people to settle in his neighbourhood,"--can certainly be none other than the father of the writer of the _Parent's Assistant_, the busy and beneficent, but surely eccentric, Mr. Edgeworth of Edgeworthstown.