as! alas! barely
five and twenty years' acquaintance with literature and its ornaments,
and the brilliant catalogue is but a _Memento Mori_. Perhaps of all
this list, Maria Edgworth's life was the happiest: simply because she
was the most retired, the least exposed to the gaze and observation of
the world, the most occupied by loving duties toward the most united
circle of old and young we ever saw assembled in one happy home.

The very young have never, perhaps, read one of the tales of a lady
whose reputation as a novelist was in its zenith when Walter Scott
published his first novel. We desire to place a chaplet upon the grave
of a woman once "celebrated" all over the known world, yet who drew
all her happiness from the lovingness of home and friends, while her
life was as pure as her renown was extensive.

In our own childhood romance-reading was prohibited, but earnest
entreaty procured an exception in favor of the "Scottish Chiefs". It
was the bright summer, and we read it by moonlight, only disturbed
by the murmur of the distant ocean. We read it, crouched in the deep
recess of the nursery-window; we read it until moonlight and morning
met, and the breakfast-bell ringing out into the soft air from the
old gable, found us at the end of the fourth volume. Dear old times!
when it would have been deemed little less than sacrilege to crush a
respectable romance into a shilling volume, and our mammas considered
_only_ a five-volume story curtailed of its just proportions.

Sir William Wallace has never lost his heroic ascendancy over us,
and we have steadily resisted every temptation to open the "popular
edition" of the long-loved romance, lest what people will call "the
improved state of the human mind", might displace the sweet memory of
the mingled admiration and indignation that chased each other, while
we read and wept, without ever questioning the truth of the absorbing
narrative.

Yet the "Scottish Chiefs" scarcely achieved the popularity of
"Thaddeus of Warsaw"--the first romance originated by the active
brain and singularly constructive power of Jane Porter--produced at an
almost girlish age.

The hero of "Thaddeus of Warsaw" was really Kosciuszko, the beloved
pupil of George Washington, the grandest and purest patriot the modern
world has known. The enthusiastic girl was moved to its composition by
the stirring times in which she lived, and a personal observation
of and acquaintance with some of those b