oo high, a
judicious admixture of these works with Miss Edgeworth's high-minded
stories, inculcating self-sacrifice, unselfishness, obedience, and other
neglected virtues, might be of great advantage. There are sundry of Miss
Edgeworth's children's tales that are truly engrossing, veritable
masterpieces of style and execution. Who is there, no matter how
advanced his age, who cannot read with pleasure the tales of _Lazy
Lawrence_, _Tarlton_, _The Bracelets_, _Waste Not Want Not_, _Forgive
and Forget_, _e tutti quanti_? Who is there whom it much disturbs that
the account of Eton Montem is not accurate, and that perhaps there could
have been nothing more unfortunate than to lay the scene of action of
_The Little Merchants_ in Naples, the one spot in all the earth where
the events therein described could not have happened? Change the name of
the locality, the charm of the tale remains and the absurdity is
removed. Nor must it be forgotten that children, less well read than
their elders, are less alive to these blemishes, which are, after all,
of no real import. Of _Simple Susan_, so great a person as Sir Walter
Scott said that "when the boy brings back the lamb to the little girl,
there is nothing for it but to put down the book and cry." Then as to
_Rosamond_, who does not feel a true affection for that impetuous,
impulsive little girl, and who is there (so greatly have our ideas of
morality changed) that does not think that in the matter of the famous
_Purple Jar_, an unjustifiable trick was played upon her by her mother?
It was a part of the Edgeworth system to make misdirected or mistaken
desires stultify themselves; but the child should have been informed of
the nature of the jar, and if then she still persisted in her choice,
she would have been fairly treated, which now she is not. _Frank_
remains a capital book for little people, and if, occasionally, Miss
Edgeworth's juvenile tales reflect too much of the stiff wisdom of her
age, these are matters which children, not morally _blase_, hardly
remark. On the other hand, there is never anything mawkish in her pages,
she never fills the mind with yearnings for the impossible, she never
works too much upon the susceptibilities, which modern child-literature
so often does. Her writings for children are certainly _sui generis_,
not because she has attempted what has never been attempted before, but
because she succeeded where others failed. She made even her youngest
reade