Fondly addressed as "dear" by her nephews, she inspired terror in the breasts of unfortunates not in the charmed circle. Eliza Douglas, resembling rather Catherine Morland than any other of Miss Austen's girls, has none of the wit of Elizabeth Bennet. She owes her settlement in life to a facility for hero-worship and a gentle willingness to please, when, in a fit of loneliness, the prematurely bored Colonel Beaufort (Ernest, aged twenty-six!) surrenders to her promise to fetch and carry for him through life, and attend to his farm accounts, as she does for papa, in the gloomy barrack of an estate which the Colonel has seldom visited. Lord Beaufort, Mary Forrester, Fisherwick, the unkempt secretary, with his blind devotion to his political chief, the foreigner more British than the Briton, all these characters walked in real life across the saloons of Bowood, Chatsworth, Panshanger, Brocket, Lansdowne and Devonshire Houses.
Miss Eden, proud, diffident, dreading publicity, hiding her talent, brings this extinct race before us with a sureness of touch which has not received, hitherto, the approbation which it is entitled to expect from posterity.
I boldly guarantee that the social historian who spends a couple of hours in Miss Eden's company will not waste his time. Every chapter will reward him with relics of another race and age, extinct as the Dodo. There is a glorious and detailed account of the slow progress of an election before the Reform Bill began to cut the rottenness from the heart of the Parliamentary borough; when polling extended beyond one day, and alternate applications of threats and spirits brought the free and independent electors one by one to the presence of the polling clerk, when the ladies openly assisted their candidates with polite bribery and the scene closed in universal intoxication. There is a glimpse of the life of young gentlemen of good family who earned a hundred a year as clerks in the
