Byron read this story when he was about fourteen, and it affected him powerfully. By a strange coincidence Kruitzener bears a strong resemblance to Lord Byron himself. He was proud and melancholy, and, while he led a life of pleasure, his spirits were always wrapped in gloom. "It made a deep impression on me," writes Byron, "and may, indeed, be said to contain the germ of much that I have since written." In 1821, he dramatised it under the title of Werner, or the Inheritance. The play follows the novel closely both in plot and conversation. An editor of Byron's works wrote of it: "There is not one incident in his play, not even the most trivial, that is not in Miss Lee's novel. And then as to the characters—not only is every one of them to be found in Kruitzener, but every one is there more fully and powerfully developed."
The Landlady's Tale is far superior to all others in the collection, if judged by present-day standards. This story of sin and its punishment reminds one in its moral earnestness of George Eliot. Mr. Mandeville had brought ruin upon a poor girl, Mary Lawson, whose own child died, when she became the wet nurse of Robert, Mr. Mandeville's legitimate son and heir. Mary grew to love the boy, but, when the father threatened to expose her character unless she would continue to be his mistress, she ran away, taking the infant with her. She became a servant in a lodging-house in Weymouth, where she lived for fifteen years, respected and beloved. At the end of that time, Mr. Mandeville came to the house as a lodger, where he neither recognised Mary nor knew his son. But he disliked Robert, and paid no heed to the fact that one of his own servants was leading the boy into evil ways. When Robert was accused of a crime which his own servant had committed, he saw him sent to prison and later transported with indifference. The grief of the father when he learned that Robert was his own child was most poignant, and his unavailing efforts to save him are vividly told. He is left bowed with grief, for he suffers under the double penalty of "a reproachful world and a reproaching conscience."
CHAPTER VII
Maria Edgeworth. Lady Morgan
"My real name is Thady Quirk, though in the family I have always been known by no other than 'honest Thady'; afterward, in the time of Sir Murtagh, diseased, I remember to hear them calling me 'old Thady,' and now I'm come to 'poor Thady.'" Thus the faithful servant of the Rackrent family introduces himself, before relating the history of the lords of the castle, where he and his had lived rent-free time out of mind. And what consummate art Maria Edgeworth showed in her first novel, Castle Rackrent, in letting "poor Thady" ramble with all the garrulity of old age. To him, who had never been farther than a day's tramp from the castle, there was nothing in the world's history but it and its owners. No servant but an Irish servant could have told the story as he did, judging the characters of his masters with shrewd wit and relating their worst failings with a "God bless them."
And where out of Ireland could Thady have found such masters, ready to spend all they had and another man's too, happy and free, and dying as merrily as they had lived! There was Sir Patrick, who, as Thady tells us, "could sit out the best man in Ireland, let alone the three kingdoms"; Sir Kit, who married a Jewess for her money; and Sir Condy, who signed away the estate rather than be bothered to look into his steward's accounts, and then feigned that he was dead that he might hear what his friends said of him at the wake. But he soon came to life, and a merry time they had of it. "But to my mind," says Thady, "Sir Condy was rather upon the sad order in the midst of it all, not finding there was such a great talk about himself after his death, as he had expected to hear." But Thady loved his master, and it is with genuine grief that he records his ultimate death, and with simple and unconscious wit he adds, "He had but a very poor funeral after all."
In The Absentee, the manners and customs of the Irish peasants are more broadly delineated than in Castle Rackrent. The Absentee was written to call the attention of the Irish landlords who were living in England to the wretched condition of their tenants left in the power of unscrupulous stewards. Lord Colambre, the son of Lord Clonbrony, an absentee, visits his father's estates, which he has not seen for many years, in disguise, and goes among the peasants, many of whom are in abject poverty. But the quick generosity of the nation speaks in the poor Widow O'Neil's "Kindly welcome, sir," with which she opens the door to the unknown lord, and its enthusiastic loyalty in the joyful acclamations of the peasants when he reveals himself to them,—a scene which Macaulay has pronounced the finest in literature since the twenty-second book of the Odyssey.
Ennui is another of her stories of Irish life, in which the supposed Earl of Glenthorn, after a long residence in England, returns to his Irish estates. The heroine of this tale is the old nurse, Ellinor O'Donoghoe. As the nurses of many stories are said to have done, she had substituted her own child for the rightful heir, and was frantic with joy when she saw him the master of Glenthorn Castle. Her devotion to the earl is pathetic, and her secret fears of the deception she had practised on the old earl may have prompted her strange speech that, if it pleased God, she would like to die on Christmas Day, of all days, "because the gates of heaven will be open all that day; and who knows but a body might slip in unbeknownst?" Ellinor is a woman of many virtues and many failings, but she is always pure Celt.