TALES FROM MARIA EDGEWORTH.*
WHY go back, it might be asked, to these century-old stories—the first portion of the tales appeared in 1794—when there are so many competitors of the newest style and fashion to claim our attention P It is not difficult to give a good reason. In the first place, there are the exceedingly attractive illustrations. The late-eighteenth-century style just suits Mr. Hugh Thomson's pencil, and he makes an admirable use of his opportunities. To be quite candid, the gaudy picture on the cover does not do justice to the artist. All the delicacy of touch in the drawing is lost. And there is one illustration—so far as we have observed, only one—to which exception may be taken. "Why those large tears ? " on p. 335, does not show us what the story leads us to expect. The attitude is, indeed, perfectly natural. Bat the affectionate Carlo is not tenderly wiping away the half-involuntary tears, but carefully scrutinising an eye into which some- thing painful has intruded itself, and Rosetta is holding her head so as to give him the best possible view. If we add that possibly Lady Diana Sweepstakes's habit, on p. 219, has skirts of modern brevity, our criticisms are exhausted. Coming to the stories themselves, we must say that they are a relief from the agitating narratives, heroic or sentimental, with which the tale-writers of to-day so plentifully regale us. As to love-making, of which, as we have said more than once, there is much more than enough in the modern books for boys and girls, there is scarcely a hint of it. The judicious Mr. Day—Sandford and Merton Day —who had something to do with Maria Edgeworth's literary training, would have been shocked beyond measure by such a thing,—it was bad enough, in his judgment, that she should write at all, at least for publication. Perhaps we may detect • Tales from Maria Edgeworth. With Introduction by Austin Dobson and Illustrations by Hugh Thomson. London: Wells Gardner, Barton, and Co [Gs.] the faint indication of an attachment in the way in which Philip prolongs his visit to Simple Susan; but that is the beginning and the end. Of peril and adventure, blood- shedding (patriotic or criminal), shipwreck, imprisonment, and all the breathless vicissitudes through which young heroes and heroines have usually to pass, there is nothing. We are taken as far as Naples, it is true, in "The Little Merchants," and the excitement rises to as high a pitch as is ever permitted in these very sober-minded romances. There is a villainous Jew and a band of robbers, one of whom snaps a pistol at the faithful Francesco. But one kind of villainy most happily counteracts the mischief of another. The pistol missed fire, for it was charged with some of the damaged powder which the Jew had sold to the band. "They were his favourite customers," the chronicler explains; but if he was in the habit of selling them damaged powder, which would be especially inconvenient to a robber, he would hardly have remained their favourite merchant. The precision and certainty with which poetical justice inter- feres to reward the good and punish the bad may seem a little surprising. The sentence on the evil works of Lawyer Case and his daughter Barbara is executed with a speed which a certain old-world moralist did not find in his ex- perience. On the other hand, the prudence of the " fore- handed " Ben is rewarded beyond reasonable expectation. He carefully unties, it will be remembered, the whipcord with which a parcel has been made up, and uses it when his bow-string breaks in the archery competition. But would whipcord, while it was too good for a parcel, be good enough for a bow-string? Still, as a rule the stories are very well constructed. Mr. Dobson in his excellent introduction rightly says that Maria Edgeworth's "supreme merit is her faculty for dramatising her story," and speaks of her ingenious invention and clever expedient as extraordinary. All these effects are produced out of very simple materials. We may smile now and then at their simplicity—at the butcher, for instance, who hastily rubs his eyes with the corner of his blue apron when called upon to slaughter Simple Susan's pet lamb (the writer of this notice knows a compassionate butcher who kept a sheep alive for two years)—but a really good literary use is made of them. The stories are well worth their reintroduction in so attractive a form to the world of readers, young and old.
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