had caused Miss Edgeworth, as it causes all of us, to regard life from a different standpoint. Experience had taught her to
Gentler scan her brother man
than she did in earlier life. Helen is so much superior in ease, nature and poetry, that it makes us deplore that Miss Edgeworth's talents had not been allowed unchecked sway. Not only is the fable more skilfully framed, but the whole shows greater passion and finer insight into the more subtle moods of humanity. Too often when men and women go on writing far into their latter years we are apt to wish that, like Prospero, they had buried their wand before it had lust its power. This is not the case with Miss Edgeworth. Helen, her last novel, which appeared after so long a silence, is in some respects the most charming of her tales, a fact doubtless due in some measure to the time that had elapsed since the cessation of her father's active influence. The old brilliancy, the quick humour, the strong sense of justice and truth which is the moral back- bone of her work, are there as before; but through the whole tale there breathes a new spirit of wider tenderness for weak, struggling human nature, and a gentleness towards its foibles which her earlier writings lacked. Years had taught her a wider toleration, had shown her, too, how large a part quick unreasoning instincts and impulses play in the lives of men and women, even of those whose constant struggle it is to subdue act and thought to the rule of duty. Helen is more of a romance than any of its predecessors, perhaps because the chief interest of the tale is concentrated in the heroine, who is the central figure round which the other persons of the story
