helping hand, possess every virtue and capacity under the sun, while
their rivals and relatives, the Falconers, have no resources but those
of cringing falsehood. They are absolutely incapable, have learnt
nothing, do not care to learn, and depend entirely upon finding a
patron. They further rely upon their luck that, when settled in their
various posts, no untoward accident may reveal their inability to fill
them. Thus sound morality, good sense and an independent spirit are
contrasted with meanness, folly and ignorance. As an eminent critic has
well remarked: "The rival families are so unequal that they cannot be
handicapped for the race. The one has all the good qualities, the other
almost all the bad. Reverse the position; encumber the Percys (to borrow
a Johnsonian phrase) with any amount of help; leave the Falconers
entirely to their own resources; and the sole difference in the result
under any easily conceivable circumstances will be that the Percys will
rise more rapidly and the Falconers will never rise at all."

The materials of the fable, therefore, are not happy; neither, such as
they are, are they artfully managed. The working out is bald, the moral
bluntly enforced. Never was Miss Edgeworth more weighted by her aim,
never were the fallacies of her cut-and-dried theories better
illustrated. In this, her longest work, it is specially evident that her
manner was not adapted to what the French call _ouvrages de longue
haleine_. But if we at once dismiss from our minds the idea of deriving
instruction from the fable, if we judiciously skip the dull pages of
rhetoric or moral preachings that are interspersed, we can gain much
real enjoyment from this book, whose characters are excellently planned
and consistently carried out. _Patronage_ contains some of Miss
Edgeworth's finest creations. The Percys as a whole are

Too bright and good
For human nature's daily food;

but even in their family had grown up a character whom we can love, with
whom we can sympathize--the warm-hearted, generously impulsive,
sprightly Rosamond, who, according to her own testimony, resembled her
creator. Caroline Percy is one of the very wise, self-contained and
excellent young persons who so often appear under different disguises in
Miss Edgeworth's tales. She is exactly one of those heroines to whom
applies the wickedly witty remark put by Bulwer into the mouth of
Darrell in _What Will He Do with It?_ "Many years si