Amongst the inhabitants of the republic of Letters there are a certain number who are never merely writers to us. Their books may be very good, or only moderately good, but for us they have a life wholly independent of the life of their books. We seem to know, or to have known them personally, and their writings form only a part, often quite a small part, of the general sense of liking and sympathy which awakens in us at the mention of their names. Amongst English writers two names will always stand in the very front of any such list - the names of Charles Lamb and of Walter Scott. Which of these two possesses the most of that endearing quality it would not be easy to say. As regards the first, not only do we feel towards him as we feel towards few whom we have personally known, but we refuse to admit the most palpable, the most self-admitted of his failings. We shut our eyes to them, as we do not by any means invariably shut our eyes to the failings of those who are our nearest and our dearest. He is Charles Lamb, and under the magic shelter of that name, even a little after-dinner tippling seems to be a trait rather attractive on the whole than otherwise.

In the case of Sir Walter Scott the affection which he awakens in his readers is often a great deal too [211] acute for pleasure. There are moments in those last years of his which we can hardly bear to think of, which sting us like the remembrance of our own unforgotten sorrows, and we are glad to remember that more than eighty healing years have rolled by since then. A few other writers may be found occupying niches here and there in this especial list, yet curiously few, when we consider how long that list is from any other standpoint. This little book will have been written to remarkably small purpose, if I have not made it clear that amongst this short list of eminently likable writers Maria Edgeworth appears to me to stand. Such a view is so entirely a personal one, that no sense of presumption can attach to the proclaiming of it. She was not - even a partial biographer must be frank - in the first flight of great writers, for although in Castle Rackrent she made a magnificent start, the promise which that book contained cannot be said to have been ever thoroughly fulfilled. She lost hersel - elle se perd dans votre triste utilité, as Madame de Staël expressed it, in writing to their joint friend M. Dumont, - and she never thoroughly found herself again. What she might have been had her surroundings been different, it is idle now to speculate, and we must be content therefore to take her as she was. For my part I am abundantly content, seeing that I regard her as one of the very pleasantest personalities to be met with in the whole wide world of books.

It is too trifling a point perhaps to mention, but it can hardly have failed, I think, to strike readers of Miss Edgeworth’s letters, how exceptionally free they are from the element of censoriousness or scandal-uniquely so, perhaps, in the case of letters equally [212] lively, and equally abounding in social details. That gift of “sportive but cutting médisance” which Lord Jeffrey commended her for bestowing upon her fine ladies, had certainly not been bestowed upon herself, or, if so, she succeeded in keeping it singularly dark. Turning over the volumes of her letters again, and trying to discover something of the sort, I have just alighted upon the following: “Has it escaped your notice” - she is writing in the year 1814 - “that the Venus de Medici and the Apollo Belvedere are both missing together? I make no remarks! I hate scandal! - at least I am less fond of it than Mrs. -, but! ...”

This libellous insinuation against the admittedly speckless virtue of the Venus de Medici is about the only clear case of médisance which I have so far been able to discover! A joke, on the other hand, Miss Edgeworth dearly loved, and would sometimes keep a favourite one going for a length of time which her correspondents may have found trying, as in the case of the French washerwoman- sourde et muette - whom she assured her sister Lucy that she was bringing back with her to Edgeworthstown from Paris, and who turned out to be a toy. It was a part of her youthfulness, that amazing youthfulness, which made her, at long past seventy, a source evidently of no small perplexity to the middle-aged brothers and sisters, several of whom were considerably more than thirty years her juniors. A saying has been often quoted of her friend and correspondent, Mrs. Somerville, who when between sixty and seventy years old, declared upon some occasion that, not only did she not feel herself to be an old woman, but had occasionally passing [213] doubts as to whether she was actually a grown-up woman. A similar assertion might quite well have been made by Miss Edgeworth of herself. In the two ladder incidents, and the letters arising out of them, we have excellent instances of this indomitable youthfulness - this childlike enjoyment of the very smallest adventures - traits which with her lasted, not merely until she was past eighty years of age, but actually, as has been seen, to within a few days of her death.

There seems nothing further to add. If Miss Edgeworth’s early years in Ireland included a few exciting days, she lived for the most part a remarkably quiet life; a life, moreover, which was so exclusively domestic, that it could hardly have failed to be a more or less humdrum one. Neither has any attempt been made in these pages to place her upon a higher literary platform than the general consensus of cultivated judgment has long ago assigned to her. It has been the woman that has been desired to be shown in them, rather than the author, the wit, the moralist, or anything else of the sort; an exceptionally pleasant woman, nay, an exceptionally pleasant Irishwoman; one whom few people ever grew to know, without also growing to like, and whom few ever found themselves brought into even accidental contact with, without being in some way or other the better for it. That, as regards the more obvious and unavoidable relationships of life-as sister, friend, employer, daughter-that in all these respects she was as little open to reproach as it has often been given to humanity to attain to, this will, I think, without any great difficulty be conceded.