purpose; but it was really the invention of the age, and I don't think she can claim the merit of being the first in the field. She was, perhaps, the first novelist with a purpose entitled to high rank on purely artistic grounds. It was her father apparently, between whom and herself there was the closest confidence, and who was from first to last her literary director, dictator, and censor,—not wholly, it is supposed, to the advantage of her art,—who insisted upon her devoting her talents to the purpose of moral education. The fact certainly is in support of this prevalent belief, that "Castle Rackrent" was the only novel written by her without his superintendence. She eluded her director in this, and wrote it as a little surprise for him. And it is the only one of her novels that has no obvious and obtruded lesson. There is no harm, even from the artistic point of view, in writing novels with a moral purpose. Novelists, whether they intend it or not, by the very fact that they represent human beings in action, and so furnish examples that readers, consciously or unconsciously, imitate, just as they imitate their own companions in real life, must influence conduct; from the very nature of their art they cannot avoid influencing conduct; and it is desirable that they should endeavor to influence conduct for the better, and not for the worse. But they are apt to miss their aim as well as injure their story by making the behavior of their characters unnatural, and the incidents that befall them impossible, if they allow the deliberate enforcement of a moral to influence the probable evolution of a story out of given characters and given circumstances. Miss Edgeworth fell into this error in several of her stories with a purpose. In "Belinda," for example, one of her tales of fashionable life, one of the most brilliantly drawn characters in fiction, Lady Delacour, is converted by the force of circumstances from a gay, heartless, daringly cynical leader of fashion into a model wife, and that, too, after years of outrageous frivolity.

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In another story, "Ennui," Lord Glenthorne, a young nobleman so rich that he has no interest in any thing, and spends his time till he reaches middle life in torpid vacuity and listless search for amusement, is suddenly changed by the loss of his fortune into a model of industry, applying himself with indefatigable perseverance to the most repulsive studies, and distancing every competitor in fields to which they have given the application of all their lives and all their abilities. Such sudden revolutions of habits in middle life are not true to nature; long-confirmed habits are not thrown off by real human beings with such ease. The novelist represents them as taking place, not in her function of a painter of manners, but in pursuance of a moral purpose. Lady Delacour's conversion is intended as an encouragement to ladies of fashion to abandon heartless flirtation and vain display; they are supposed to be struck with the greater happiness of the lady in her regenerate condition. And Lord Glenthorne's conversion is intended as an incentive to noble lords to discard unworthy amusement, and experience the greater happiness of energies devoted to nobler pursuits. Such is the novelist's obvious intention; but whether such pictures are likely to do more harm than good is not so clear, for the ease with which these interesting reprobates shake off their long-indulged habits is apt to encourage would-be imitators of their ultimate good conduct to defer the period of amendment till it is too late. I admit, however, that from the moralist's point of view, quite apart from strict adherence to human probabilities, there is something to be said on the other side, and that the delight taken by the converts in their altered course of conduct may be rendered more potent as an example by the fact that they are represented as deriving no real pleasure from the pleasure-seeking of their unregenerate days. It would, however, give an entirely wrong idea of Miss Edgeworth's novels to lay much stress on their moral

purpose. Apart from their purpose, they are most brilliant pictures of life. The moral is not constantly

obtruded, as in Hannah More's celebrated "Cœlebs in Search of a Wife," published while Miss Edgeworth was in the height of her popularity. The reader, especially the young lady reader, is preached at from beginning to end of that excellent work; the only incidents in Mr. Cœlebs's career are his visits to various families in the course of his deliberate search, the only surprises consist in the discovery of weak points in superficially pleasing young ladies, and sterling qualities in the superficially unattractive. We are not led to feel the slightest interest in the issue of Mr. Calebs's great enterprise; there is nothing shown in him to make us care whether he finds a woman worthy of his fastidious choice or not. Yet Hannah More was far from being a dull writer, and in the exposure of affectation and pretence and shallowness she showed a very fine sense of humor. Only, her book is not a story, but a string of journalistic social articles on the minor and the higher morals. Now, Miss Edgeworth is not so avowedly and obtrusively didactic as this. She is seldom so clear and decided in her purpose as, for example, Mr. Wilkie Collins in "Heart and Science," or Mr. Besant in "All Sorts and Conditions of Men.” She took an interest, either for herself or at her father's instigation, in various social reforms, and did her best to advance them incidentally, as Dickens did in "Nicholas Nickleby" or "Dombey and Son." The proportion of direct didactic in her writings is really comparatively small, while her pictures of life, as it was to be seen in fashionable society and on Irish estates, were as faithful and complete as they were animated, sensible, and humorous. Miss Edgeworth must certainly be pronounced to have gone out of fashion, seeing that Miss Broughton ran a tale through one of the magazines with the title of "Belinda," without any body remarking, in print, at least, that this was

the title of one of Miss Edgeworth's most famous novels. Whether Miss Zimmern's pleasantly written biography in the Eminent Women of Letters Series will do any thing to restore her faded popularity is doubtful; and yet novel-readers who have exhausted the novels of their own generation might do worse than give "Belinda " or "Castle Rackrent" a trial.

If I were to judge from my own experience, I should not recommend Miss Austen's "Pride and Prejudice " or "Sense and Sensibility," still less "Mansfield Park " or "Emma," with the same confidence to confirmed novel-readers of the present day. Nobody can read any of Miss Austen's works without admiring her wonderful closeness and keenness of humorous observation, the skill with which she displays every turn in the motives of commonplace character, and the exquisite quality of the ridicule with which her fancy dances round and round them as she holds them up to our inspection. If you once make the acquaintance of the Bennet family in "Pride and Prejudice," you can never forget them, so distinctly is each individual marked, and so keen and exquisite is the revelation of their foibles. In mere art of humorous portraiture, in a quieter and less farcical style than Miss Burney's, Miss Austen is an expert of classical finish. But somehow, speaking for myself, I must confess to a certain want of interest in the characters themselves. Unless one is really interested in the subjects of such an elaborate art of portraiture, the gradual revelation of them, touch after touch, is apt to become tedious, however much one may enjoy for a time the quick and delicate play of the writer's gently malicious humor. But this want of interest in the characters of English middle-class provincial life is of course a personal defect. You will find that Mrs. Oliphant writes with rapture about her great predecessor in fiction, and I dare say you have

read somewhere Sir Walter Scott's often-quoted compliment to her. "Read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely written Pride and Prejudice," he entered in his Diary. "That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bowwow strain I can do myself, like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early." Sir Walter also reviewed her novels in the Quarterly, and helped to bring them into notice. In one respect she had a great and legitimate attraction for novelreaders of her own time that she no longer possesses. Her field of manners-painting was new; nobody before her had taken scenes and characters from the life of the provinces, though Miss Burney had had hosts of imitators in the description of fashionable life in the metropolis. And she had another distinction also, not so striking now, in the fact that when fiction was overrun with romantic sentiment and improbable incident, workers in the hackneyed paths having reached a despicable level when her first novel made its appearance in 1811, she restricted herself to ordinary every-day character, and never went beyond probability either in conduct or in incident. Miss Austen was the daughter of the rector of Steventon, a parish in Hampshire; and after her father's death, and before publishing her novels, she lived for some years with her mother at Southampton, and for some time at Bath. All the material of her novels is such as might have come within the range of her own limited personal experience, and she treats her characters and comments on their conduct very much as she and her family were in the habit of looking at and criticising the life of their own