of taking a
place in the former: but preferred to marry a minister-professor and
settled down to country manse life. She died in middle age and her
husband wrote a memoir of her. _Discipline_ seems to represent a sort of
fancy combination of the life she might have led and the life she did
lead. Ellen Percy, the heroine, starts in the highest circles; forgets
herself so far as to "waltz_e_" with a noble ne'er-do-weel, thereby
earning the "stern disapprobation" of a respectable lover; comes down in
the world; has Highland experiences which, at the book's early date, are
noteworthy; marries (like her creatress) a minister; but "retains a
little of her coquettish sauciness." "Bless her, poor little dear!" one
can imagine Thackeray exclaiming in his later and mellowed days. Mrs.
Brunton's letters breathe a lady-like and not unamiable propriety, and
she is altogether a sort of milder, though actually earlier, Miss
Ferrier.

Ireland vindicated its claim to comparative liveliness in the work of a
better known contemporary and survivor. Lady Morgan's (Miss Sydney
Owenson's) _Wild Irish Girl_ (1806) is one of the books whose titles
have prolonged for them a kind of shadowy existence. It is written in
letters: and the most interesting thing about it for some readers now is
that the heroine supplied Thackeray with the name Glorvina, which, it
seems, means in Irish "sweet voice," if Lady Morgan is to be trusted _in
rebus Celticis_. It is to be hoped she is: for the novel is a sort of
_macedoine_ of Irish history, folk-lore, scenery, and what not, done up
in a syrup of love-making _quant. suff._ Its author wrote many more
novels and became a butt for both good- and ill-natured satire with the
comic writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties. The title was
actually borrowed by Maturin in _The Wild Irish_ "Boy," and it is fair
to say that the book preceded Scott's, though not Miss Edgeworth's,
experiments in the line of the "national" novel. The earlier Reviewers
were discreditably savage on women-writers, and Lady Morgan had her
share of their truculence. She did not wholly deserve it: but it must be
said that nothing she wrote can really be ranked as literature, save on
the most indiscriminate and uncritical estimate. It is, however,
difficult to see much harm in her.

_Ida of Athens_, for instance, which shocked contemporaries, and which,
by the way, has the very large first title of _Woman_, could only bring
a blush to chee