s fresh.
In the chapter on wit and eloquence in _Irish Bulls_ there is a
speech of a poor freeholder to a candidate who asked for his vote;
this speech was made to my father when he was canvassing the county
of Longford. It was repeated to me a few hours afterwards, and I
wrote it down instantly, without, I believe, the variation of a
word.

The complaint of a poor widow against her landlord, and his reply, were
quoted by Campbell in his _Lectures on Eloquence_, as happy specimens,
under the conviction that they were fictitious. Miss Edgeworth assures
us that they are "unembellished facts," that her father was the
magistrate before whom the complaint and defense were made, and that she
wrote down the speeches word for word as he repeated them to her. This
_Essay on Irish Bulls_, though a somewhat rambling and discursive
composition, is a readable one, full of good stories, pathetic and
humorous. Besides giving critical and apt illustrations, the authors did
justice to the better traits of the Irish character. It was an earnest
vindication of the national intellect from the charge of habitual
blundering, showing how blundering is common to all countries, and is no
more Irish than Persian. They further proved that most so-called bulls
are no bulls at all, but often a poetic license, a heart-spoken
effusion, and that thus the offense became a grace beyond the reach of
art.

_Moral Tales_ also saw the light in 1801. They too were written to
illustrate _Practical Education_, but aimed at readers of a more
advanced age than the children's tales; in fact, both here and elsewhere
Miss Edgeworth strove to do on a larger scale what was achieved by the
ancient form of parable, to make an attractive medium for the
instruction and conviction of minds. It was a fancy of hers, and perhaps
a characteristic of her age, when female authorship was held in somewhat
doubtful repute, that she invariably insisted on appearing before the
public under cover of her father's name. He therefore wrote for _Moral
Tales_, as afterwards for all her works, one of his ludicrously
bombastic prefaces, which, whatever they may have done in his own time,
would certainly to-day be the most effective means of repelling readers.
The stories are six in number: _Forester_, _The Prussian Vase_, _The
Good Aunt_, _Angelina_, _The Good French Governess_, and _Mademoiselle
Panache_. Of these the plots are for the most part poorly contr