She had humour, pathos, knowledge of the world, power of drawing it, acquaintance with literature, shrewd common sense, an excellent style when she was allowed to write in her own way, the feelings of a lady who was also a good woman.

King Charles is made to say in _Woodstock_ that "half the things in the world remind him of the Tales of Mother Goose." It is astonishing, in the real complimentary sense, how many things remind one of situations, passages, phrases, in Miss Edgeworth's works of all the kinds from _Castle Rackrent_ to _Frank_.

She also had a great and an acknowledged influence on Scott, a considerable and a certainly not disavowed influence on Miss Austen.

She is good reading always, however much we may sometimes pish and pshaw at the untimely poppings-in of the platitudes and crotchets (for he was that most abominable of things, a platitudinous crotcheteer) of Richard her father.

She was a girl of fourteen when the beginnings of the domestic novel were laid in _Evelina_, and she lived to see it triumph in _Vanity Fair_.