ons us, and see things from different points
of view; and Miss Edgeworth could do so less than many, because she was
less highly endowed with sympathetic imagination. Thus her shortcomings
are, in her case, more than in that of many others, the fault of her
surroundings and education. For, placed immediately under Mr.
Edgeworth's personal influence, his powers of suasion and plausible
presentment, it was not easy to escape, and his daughter never
questioned his final wisdom or desired such escape. In a critical
reading of her books it is amusing to note how ever and again her father
crops forth. Thus her heroes constantly ask what manner of education the
young lady of their choice has received, because as "prudent men" they
feel that only on this can they base their future hopes of happiness.
And yet, strangely enough, with this absolute faith in the power of
education is combined a belief that nothing, not even this almighty
thing, can overcome the fact that if a girl be the daughter of a woman
who has at any time forgotten herself, no matter how good the education
may have been, no matter that this parent may have died at her birth or
the child never lived beside her, Miss Edgeworth's heroes regard her as
necessarily lost--consider that it is impossible she should continue in
the straight path. They will stifle their strongest feelings; make
themselves and the girl miserable rather than marry her. A special
instance of this occurs in the _Absentee_, where Lord Colambre prefers
to break off his engagement with his adored cousin, the charming and
high-spirited Grace Nugent, rather than wed her after he hears a rumor
that her mother has not been legally married to her father. Hence a
_deus ex machina_ has to be evoked, who, like all such gods, cuts the
Gordian knot in bungling fashion. After attributing all possibilities to
education, there is quite a comic inconsistency in this method of
visiting the offenses of the wrong-doer upon the victim. But Miss
Edgeworth, or rather her father, appeared to have no comprehension of
the fact that misfortunes of birth most frequently act on the children
as a deterrent; so that they make, as it were, hereditary expiation. But
here appears the want of tenderness in Miss Edgeworth's work--a quantity
she owned as a woman and lacked as an author. The two were certainly
curiously different at times. But though not tender, she is always
amiable and kindly, even though she does not look far b