One will not find startling things in her {280} writing; nor will you find great brilliancy of execution--nor the pretty banter and delicate English humor, and finer touches which belong to Miss Austen: but you will find orderly progress and a good orderly story--illuminated by flashes of Irish wit, and glowing through and through with the kindness of a heart which never saw suffering without sympathy, and never any joys of even the most vulgar, without a tender satisfaction. Add to this a shrewd common sense--which never lost its way in romantic pitfalls, and an unblinking honesty, and charity of purpose--always making itself felt, and always driving a nail--and you have an array of qualities which will, I think, keep good Miss Edgeworth's name alive for a long period to come. Few people will have the courage to invest in the whole of her score of volumes octavo. It is hardly to be advised; but you may wisely choose a sprinkling of them; her _Frank_, for instance--her _Rackrent_--her _Ormond_, and a volume or two of her shorter tales, which will bravely hold their own amongst all the goody books of a later generation. Two specimens of that Irish humor, which she {281} is so apt at reporting, and which shine by their pretty flicker of unconsciousness, I must cite: the first is that of the politician--a charming type of our municipal Milesians--who resented highly his non-appointment to some fat place, after unwearied support of the government, "against his conscience, in a most honorable manner." The second is that of the hopeful old Irish dame, who trusted she might die upon a fête day, when the gates of Heaven were opened wide, and a poor "body might slip in unbeknownst." For our good friend, Miss Edgeworth, we believe that those gates were wide open, on every day of the year. _Some Early Romanticism._ [Sidenote: Early Romanticism.] While that clever and attractive Miss Jane Austen was engaged upon her stories in her quiet study in Steventon, Hampshire, there was opened upon England, by certain other ladies, a new sluice of literature--from which some phosphorescent sparkles are still distinguishable in our {282} time--in brilliant red and yellow covers. I allude to the _Children of the Abbey_, by Miss Roche[11] (an Irish-French lady, who lived in Waterford, Ireland), to _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ and the _Scottish Chiefs_ by Miss Jane Porter, and the _Mysteries of Udolpho_ by Mrs. Radcliffe, of London.[12] Very few middle-aged readers have passed their lives without hearing of these books; the chances are strong that most of such readers have dipped into them; and if people dipped at all, before the age of fourteen, they were pretty apt to undergo complete submergence.