Harry and Lucy, begun by Mr. Edgeworth and continued at intervals with Maria’s help, was finished by her in 1825[161]. The four volumes, she says, complete the series of “Early Lessons”, in which Harry and Lucy had already figured; but although her drawings of the two children add colour to the book, it is really an oblation, on Mr. Edgeworth’s behalf, to the Giant Instruction.
At this stage, it is true, there is a laboratory as well as a museum in the giant’s castle; he can illustrate the marvels of steam and suggest experiments with electricity. Yet this is only a more practical Circle of the Sciences. The children’s voices are trained to the question and answer of a “Guide to Knowledge”; their lives are marked off in lesson-periods. Even when a dull journey offers the means of escape, these little captives hug their chains. They never travel without books, and when there is nothing to observe from the carriage windows, they find education in the forests of the Oroonoko, where the plague of flies affords “an inexhaustible subject of conversation.”
The “Grand Panjandrum” could never come better than into this juvenile Cyclopædia.[162]
Mr. Foote’s “droll nonsense” pleases Miss Edgeworth chiefly because it was invented to test a man’s memory; yet she can tolerate nonsense, at any rate when there is no danger of its being confused with sense.
They are all there: “the Picninnies and the Joblillies and the Garyulies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself with the little round button at top.” Lucy laughs and enjoys it, Harry calls it “horrible nonsense”; but their father’s opinion is final, and Miss Edgeworth agrees with him:
“It is sweet to talk nonsense in season. Always sense would make Jack a dull boy.”
The didactic purpose, which hampers the story-teller at every turn, becomes more irksome as an audience passes from childhood into youth. Fixed patches of light and shade appear unnatural; the critical eyes of youth are open to devices that passed unnoticed in the nursery.
Miss Edgeworth’s Moral Tales, “for young people of a more advanced age”,[163] followed Marmontel into his own province; but Marmontel drew his lessons from the world as he found it; Miss Edgeworth fits her world to her father’s theories.
Here again she has admirable portraits: the Quixotic Forester, a new and convincing likeness of Thomas Day; Angelina, that mirror of “romantic eccentricities”; Mademoiselle Panache, little changed since her first appearance, but here balanced by a “good French Governess”. The unconscious satire of Lady Catherine is twice barbed: