effect the
result that no one will read that which is tedious. Yet even when
hampered by the illustration of copy-book morality, Miss Edgeworth could
not hide her power. She never repeats herself; every story is unlike the
other. She does not angrily apply herself to the correction of the vices
and abuses she holds peculiar to the class she addresses; neither does
she magnify, even though she emphasizes. We only behold them shorn of
the indulgences and palliations they too often meet with. She was
neither a Utopian purist nor a sentimental innocent; nor can she belie a
natural tendency to make her ethics rather a code of high-minded
expediency than of high principle for its own sake only. Throughout her
writings she shows that from low as well as high motives, good actions
are the best; but she never suffers her characters to rest in the reward
of a quiet conscience. Her supreme good sense was always mingled with a
regard for the social proprieties; she never loses these quite from
sight; her idea of right is as much to preserve these as for right
itself. For, after all, Miss Edgeworth's life revolved amid the
fashionable world, and lofty as her aims are, she was not wholly
untainted by her surroundings. She accounts it no crime in her heroines
if they look out for a good establishment, money, horses, carriages;
provided always that the man they marry be no dunce, she will overlook
any little lack of affection. But, after all, she was teaching only in
accordance with the superficial philosophy of the last century, which
led people to found their doctrines entirely upon self-interest.

Still, a tone of rationality and good sense was so new in the tales of
Miss Edgeworth's period, that to this alone a large share of the
undoubted success and popularity of the _Popular Tales_ may be ascribed.
Lord Jeffrey, criticising them at the time of their appearance, remarked
that "it required almost the same courage to get rid of the jargon of
fashionable life, and the swarms of peers, foundlings and seducers, as
it did to sweep away the mythological persons of antiquity and to
introduce characters who spoke and acted like those who were to peruse
these adventures." Miss Edgeworth was certainly the first woman to make
domestic fiction the vehicle of great and necessary truths, and on this
account alone she must ever take high rank, and be forgiven if that
which has been said of her in general be specially true of _Popular
Tales_, th