who sets upon him from pure déscœuvrement, and for whom any other person who had come into her path at that moment would have been equally acceptable game. The work is thrown into the form of letters, which gives to Miss Edgeworth an opportunity, inimitably carried out, of making all the personages paint themselves and speak in the language that is most natural to them. These letters are excellently varied. Lady Olivia's teem with French and German sentiment and metaphysics of self-deception; Leonora's are as candid and generous as herself, yet though her motives are lofty, we discern a certain air of aristocratic hauteur; while the good sense in General B—'s is bluntly expressed.
The fault of the story is that the husband's conversion ought to have been brought about by purely moral means, and not by the accidental interception of his false mistress's letters. Thus the value of the whole moral is destroyed by its creator. That Delphine in a manner suggested this story, that but for this romance Leonora might not have assumed its peculiar shape, may be taken almost for granted. A certain notion of refuting this corrupt story, then at the high tide of its popularity, may also have been present in Miss Edgeworth's mind, who at no time was so much self-absorbed as to lose sight of the ultimate aim in all her writings. Those were the days of excessive sensibility, when to yearn after elective affinities was the fashion. From such a state of feeling Miss Edgeworth's temperament and training secured her, and for very fear of it she erred in an opposite extreme. But with the true artist's instinct she recognised that it was in the air, and she makes it the theme of a romance that holds it up not only to ridicule, but shows with
