k white satin waistcoats for her papa. She was then
removed to a fashionable establishment in Upper Wimpole Street, where,
says her stepmother, 'she underwent all the usual tortures of
backboards, iron collars, and dumb-bells, with the unusual one of being
hung by the neck to draw out the muscles and increase the growth,--a
signal failure in her case.' (Miss Edgeworth was always a very tiny
person.) There is a description given of Maria at this school of hers of
the little maiden absorbed in her book with all the other children at
play, while she sits in her favourite place in front of a carved oak
cabinet, quite unconscious of the presence of the romping girls all
about her.

Hers was a very interesting character as it appears in the
Memoirs--sincere, intelligent, self-contained, and yet dependent;
methodical, observant. Sometimes as one reads of her in early life one
is reminded of some of the personal characteristics of the writer who
perhaps of all writers least resembles Miss Edgeworth in her art--of
Charlotte Bronte, whose books are essentially of the modern and
passionate school, but whose strangely mixed character seemed rather to
belong to the orderly and neatly ruled existence of Queen Charlotte's
reign. People's lives as they really are don't perhaps vary very much,
but people's lives as they seem to be assuredly change with the fashions.
Miss Edgeworth and Miss Bronte were both Irishwomen, who have often,
with all their outcome, the timidity which arises from quick and
sensitive feeling. But the likeness does not go very deep. Maria,
whose diffidence and timidity were personal, but who had a firm and
unalterable belief in family traditions, may have been saved from some
danger of prejudice and limitation by a most fortunate though trying
illness which affected her eyesight, and which caused her to be removed
from her school with its monstrous elegancies to the care of Mr. Day,
that kindest and sternest of friends.

This philosopher in love had been bitterly mortified when the lively
Elizabeth Sneyd, instead of welcoming his return, could not conceal her
laughter at his uncouth elegancies, and confessed that, on the whole,
she had liked him better as he was before. He forswore Lichfield and
marriage, and went abroad to forget. He turned his thoughts to politics;
he wrote pamphlets on public subjects and letters upon slavery. His poem
of the 'Dying Negro' had been very much admired. Miss Hannah More speaks
o