Edgeworth's, which I still continue to think gems in their own line,
are made chronicles, or, more truly, illustrations of various truths
worked out upon the same personages. Moreover, the skill of a Jane
Austen or a Mrs. Gaskell is required to produce a perfect plot
without doing violence to the ordinary events of an every-day life.
It is all a matter of arrangement. Mrs. Gaskell can make a perfect
little plot out of a sick lad and a canary bird; and another can do
nothing with half a dozen murders and an explosion; and of arranging
my materials so as to build up a story, I was quite incapable. It is
still my great deficiency; but in those days I did not even
understand that the attempt was desirable. Criticism was a more
thorough thing in those times than it has since become through the
multiplicity of books to be hurried over, and it was often very
useful, as when it taught that such arrangement of incident was the
means of developing the leading idea.

Yet, with all its faults, the children, who had been real to me,
caught, chiefly by the youthful sense of fun and enjoyment, the
attention of other children; and the curious semi-belief one has in
the phantoms of one's brain made me dwell on their after life and
share my discoveries with my friends, not, however, writing them down
till after the lapse of all these years the tenderness inspired by
associations of early days led to taking up once more the old
characters in The Two Sides of the Shield; and the kind welcome this
has met with has led to the resuscitation of the crude and
inexperienced tale which never pretended to be more than a mere
family chronicle.

C. M. YONGE.
6th October 1886.