Severity was the order of those times. The reign of sugar-plums had
scarcely begun. It was not, as now, only ignorance and fanaticism that
encouraged the giving of pain, it was the universal custom. People
were still hanged for stealing, women were still burnt--so we have
been assured--in St. Stephen's Green; though, it is true, they were
considerately strangled first. Children were bullied and tortured with
the kindest intentions; even Maria Edgeworth at her fashionable school
was stretched in a sort of machine to make her grow; Mr. Day, as we
know, to please the lady of his affections, passed eight hours a day
in the stocks in order to turn out his knock-knees. One feels that a
generation of ladies and gentlemen who submitted to such inflictions
surely belonged to a race of heroes and heroines, and that, if the times
were difficult and trying, the people also were stronger to endure them,
and must have been much better fitted with nerves than we are.

Miss Edgeworth's life has been so often told that I will not attempt to
recapitulate the story at any length. She well deserved her reputation.
Her thoughts were good, her English was good, her stories had the charm
of sincerity, and her audience of children was a genuine audience, less
likely to be carried away by fashion than more advanced critics might
be. There is a curious matter-of-fact element in all she wrote, combined
with extraordinary quickness and cleverness; and it must be remembered,
in trying to measure her place in literature, that in her day the whole
great school of English philosophical romance was in its cradle; George
Eliot was not in existence; my father was born in the year in which THE
ABSENTEE was published. Sir Walter Scott has told us that it was Miss
Edgeworth's writing which first suggested to him the idea of writing
about Scotland and its national life. Tourgenieff in the same way says
that it was after reading her books on Ireland that he began to write