ney's Diary can fail to
feel that a woman who commands such idiom is easily an adept in
the realistic dialogue of the novel. Here, even more than in her
own novels or those of Richardson and Fielding, we hear the
exact syllable and intonation of contemporary speech. "Mr.
Cholmondeley is a clergyman," she writes, "nothing shining
either in person or manners but rather somewhat grim in the
first and glum in the last." And again: "Our confab was
interrupted by the entrance of Mr. King," or yet again: "The
joke is, the people speak as if they were afraid of me, instead
of my being afraid of them.... Next morning, Mrs. Thrale asked
me if I did not want to see Mrs. Montagu? I truly said I should
be the most insensible of animals not to like to see our sex's
glory." It is hard to realize that this was penned in the
neighborhood of one hundred and fifty years ago, so modern is
its sound.

A great writer, with a wider scope and a more incisive satire,
is Maria Edgeworth, whose books take us over into the nineteenth
century. The lighter, more frivolous aspects of English high
society are admirably portrayed in her "Belinda" and eight or
ten other tales: and she makes a still stronger claim to
permanent remembrance in such studies of Irish types, whether in
England or on the native soil, as "The Absentee" and "Castle
Rackrent." I venture the statement that even the jaded novel
reader of to-day will find on a perusal of either of these
capital stories that Miss Edgeworth makes literature, and that a
pleasure not a penance is in store. She first in English fiction
exploited the better-class Irishman at home and her scenes have
historic value. Some years later, Susan Ferrier, who enjoyed the
friendship of Scott, wrote under the stimulus of Maria
Edgeworth's example a series of clever studies of Scotch life,
dashed with decided humor and done with true observation.

These women, with their quick eye and facile ability to report
what they saw, and also their ease of manner which of itself
seems like a social gift, were but the prelude to the work so
varied, gifted and vastly influential, which the sex was to do
in the modern Novel; so that, at present, in an open field and
no favors given, they are honorable rivals of men, securing
their full share of public favor. And the English Novel, written
by so many tentatively during these fifty years when the form
was a-shaping, culminates at the turn of the century in two
contrasted aut