to describe "such situations only ... as children can easily imagine,"
was not able entirely to resist tempting specimens of human nature like
the bibulous Mr. Corkscrew, the burglar butler in "The False Key," or
Mrs. Pomfret, the housekeeper of the same story, whose prejudices
against the _Villaintropic_ Society, and its unholy dealing with the
"_drugs and refuges_" of humanity, are quite in the style of the Mrs.
Slipslop of a great artist whose works one would scarcely have expected
to encounter among the paper-backed and grey-boarded volumes which lined
the shelves at Edgeworthstown. Mrs. Theresa Tattle, again, in "The
Mimic," is a type which requires but little to fit it for a subordinate
part in a novel, as is also Lady Diana Sweepstakes in "Waste not, Want
not." In more than one case, we seem to detect an actual portrait. Mr.
Somerville of Somerville ("The White Pigeon"), to whom that "little
town" belonged,--who had done so much "to inspire his tenantry with a
taste for order and domestic happiness, and took every means in his
power to encourage industrious, well-behaved people to settle in his
neighbourhood,"--can certainly be none other than the father of the
writer of the _Parent's Assistant_, the busy and beneficent, but surely
eccentric, Mr. Edgeworth of Edgeworthstown.

When, in 1849, the first two volumes of Macaulay's _History_ were
issued, Miss Edgeworth, then in her eighty-third winter, was greatly
delighted to find her name, coupled with a compliment to one of her
characters, enshrined in a note to chap. vi. But her gratification was
qualified by the fact that she could discover no similar reference to
her friend, Sir Walter Scott. The generous "twinge of pain," to which
she confesses, was intelligible. Scott had always admired her genius,
and she admired his. In the "General Preface" to the _Waverley Novels_,
twenty years before, he had gone so far as to say that, without hoping
to emulate "the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact" of