Romance dies hard; but the odds were against Rosamond:
“And now, Mamma, lay out my garden for me, as Godfrey says, exactly to your own taste; and I will alter it all to-morrow to please you.” This would be Emily and her mother over again, if it were not so like Maria and her father.
Dealing with a criticism by her cousin, Colonel Stuart, Miss Edgeworth wrote: “I know I feel how much more is to be done, ought to be done, by suggestion than by delineation, by creative fancy than by facsimile copying”; but she wisely stuck to her own method. It is where she touches the magic circle that she is “spell-stopp’d.” When Laura reads the fairy-tale to Rosamond (she is only allowed one), her passage into an unreasonable world is marked by a change of diction. The Edgeworth fairy is “inexpressibly elegant”; her flowing robe is “tinctured with all the variety of colours that it is possible for nature or art to conceive”. But there is nothing supernatural about her. She is merely a new specimen for the Museum, to be “contemplated with attention”, like the others. The result, recorded in a scientific note, proves her a creature of flesh and blood:
“Small though she was, I could distinguish every fold in her garment, nay, even every azure vein that wandered beneath her snowy skin.”
Dr. Johnson and Miss Edgeworth took opposite sides on this question of the supernatural; and since experience proves that both were right, both must have been wrong.
Mr. Edgeworth attacked the Doctor’s belief that “babies do not want to hear about babies”, and Maria proved it a fallacy; but neither disposed of his claim for “somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.”
Mr. Edgeworth’s questions are not arguments: “why should the mind be filled with fantastic visions, instead of useful knowledge? Why should so much valuable time be lost? Why should we vitiate their taste and spoil their appetite, by suffering them to feed upon sweetmeats?”[166]
Dr. Johnson could have answered him, and perhaps Mr. Edgeworth knew it, for he adds:
“It is to be hoped that the magic of Dr. Johnson’s name will not have power to restore the reign of fairies.”