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ntity--about her; but she was as good an Irish woman as ever walked, and there are hundreds of Irish people of her class and creed looking at Irish life with kindly humorous Irish eyes, seeing pretty much what she saw, enjoying it as she enjoyed it, but with neither her power nor her will to set it down. _Castle Rackrent_ is a masterpiece; and had Miss Edgeworth been constant to the dramatic method which she then struck out for herself, with all the fine reticences that it involved, her name might have stood high in literature. Unhappily, her too exemplary father repressed the artist in her, fostered the pedagogue, and in her later books she commits herself to an attitude in which she can moralise explicitly upon the ethical and social bearings of every word and action. The fine humour in _Ormond_ is obscured by its setting; in _Castle Rackrent_ the humour shines. Sir Condy and his lady we see none the less distinctly for seeing them through the eyes of old Thady, the retainer who narrates the Rackrent history; and in the process we have a vision of old Thady himself. Now and then the novelist reminds us of her presence by some extravagantly ironic touch, as when Thady describes Sir Condy's anger with the Government "about a place that was promised him and never given, after his supporting them against his conscience very honourably and being greatly abused for, he having the name of a great patriot in the country." Thady would hardly have been so ingenuous as that. But for the most part the humour is truly inherent in the situation, and you might look far for a better passage than the description of Sir Condy's parting with his lady. But it is better to illustrate from a scene perhaps less genuinely humorous, but more professedly so--Sir Condy's wake. Miss Edgeworth does not dwell on the broad farce of the entertainment; she does not make Thady eloquent over the whisky that was drunk and the fighting that began and so forth, as Lever or Carleton would certainly have been inclined to do. She fixes on the central comedy of the situation, Sir Condy's innocent vanity and its pitiable disappointment--is it necessary to recall that he had arranged for the wake himself, because he always wanted to see his own funeral? Poor Sir Condy!--even Thady, who was in the secret, had forgotten all about him, when he was startled by the sound of his master's voice from under the greatcoats thrown all atop. "'Thady,' says he, 'I've h
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