was really designed, purpose and moral being more skillfully
disguised than is the case with Miss Edgeworth's tales for her equals.
One of its great charms lies in the characters of the principal
_dramatis personae_, whose temperaments are exquisitely sketched,
maintained and contrasted. Lucy, the lively, playful girl, who often
allows her imagination to go rambling far afield from her judgment, a
little inclined to be volatile, loving a joke, is cousin german to
Rosamond, and, like this little girl, truly lovable. She supplies the
lighter element, while the sterner is supplied by Harry, the brother she
idolizes, who is partly her companion, partly her teacher. He has a sure
and steady rather than a brilliant and rapid intellect, great mental
curiosity and great patience in acquiring information. He is more apt to
discern differences than to perceive resemblances, and therefore he does
not always understand the wit and fun of Lucy, which at times even
provoke him. In the conversations between them there is much judicious
sprinkling of childish banter and nonsense, "an alloy necessary to make
sense work well," to use Miss Edgeworth's own expressive words. A pity
that the ever-delightful "Great Panjandrum" therein introduced is not
her own, but only a quotation from a little-known nonsense genius.

This sequel to _Harry and Lucy_ was far from finding universal favor.
Sir Walter Scott wrote of it to Joanna Baillie:--

I have not the pen of our friend Miss Edgeworth, who writes all the
while she laughs, talks, eats and drinks, and I believe, though I
do not pretend to be so far in the secret, all the time she sleeps
too. She has good luck in having a pen which walks at once so
unweariedly and so well. I do not, however, quite like her last
book on education (_Harry and Lucy_), considered as a general work.
She should have limited the title to _Education in Natural
Philosophy_, or some such term, for there is no great use in
teaching children in general to roof houses or build bridges,
which, after all, a carpenter or a mason does a great deal better
at 2s. 6d. a day. Your ordinary Harry should be kept to his
grammar, and your Lucy of most common occurrence would be kept
employed on her sampler, instead of wasting wood and cutting their
fingers, which I am convinced they did, though their historian says
nothing of it.

That both she and her father