pish and pshaw at the untimely poppings-in of the platitudes and crotchets (for he was that most abominable of things, a platitudinous crotcheteer) of Richard her father.  She was a girl of fourteen when the beginnings of the domestic novel were laid in Evelina, and she lived to see it triumph in Vanity Fair.  But her own work, save in some of her short stories, which are pretty perfect, represents the imperfect stage of the development—­the stage when the novel is trying for the right methods and struggling to get into the right ways, but has not wholly mastered the one or reached the others.

There are those who would assign what they might call “higher genius,” or “rarer gift,” or something similar, to her countryman Charles Robert Maturin.  The present writer is not very fond of these measurings together of things incommensurable—­these attempts to rank the “light white sea-mew” as superior or inferior to the “sleek black pantheress.”  It is enough to say that while Miss Edgeworth very deliberately adopted the novel, and even, as we have seen, slightly satirised at least pseudo-romance, Maturin was romantic or nothing.  His life was hardly half hers in length, and his temperament appears to have been as discontented as hers was sunny:  but he had his successes in drama as well as in novel, and one of his attempts in the latter kind had a wide-ranging influence abroad as well as at home, has been recently printed both in whole and in part, and undoubtedly ranks among the novels which any tolerably well instructed person would enumerate if he were asked to give a pretty full list of celebrated (and deservedly celebrated) books of the kind in English.  The others fall quite out of comparison. The Fatal Revenge or the Family of Montorio (1807) is a try for the “furthest” in the Radcliffe-Lewis direction, discarding indeed the crudity of The Monk, but altogether neglecting the restraint of Udolpho and its companions in the use of the supernatural. The Wild Irish Boy (1808), The Milesian Chief (1812), Women (1818), and The Albigenses (1824) are negligible, the last, perhaps, rather less so than the others.  But Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is in quite a different case.  It has faults in plenty—­especially a narrative method of such involution that, as it has been said, “a considerable part of the book consists of a story told to a certain person, who is a character in a longer story, found in a manuscript which is delivered to a third person, who narrates the greater part of the novel to a fourth person, who is the namesake and descendant of the title-hero.”  Stripped of these tiresome lendings (which, as has been frequently pointed out, were a mania with the eighteenth century and naturally grew to such intricacy as this), the central story, though not exactly new, is impressive:  and it is told and worked out in manner more impressive, because practically novel, save for, perhaps, a little