No wonder poor Rosamond is disheartened and silenced by such an array of difficulties in her path. It is comforting to know that Godfrey himself comes to grief, a little later, with The Bard, and that even the wise and irreproachable Laura confesses to have been baffled by the lines,
"If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song
May hope, chaste eve, to soothe thy modest ear."
"Oaten stop" was a mystery, and "eve" she thought—and was none the worse for thinking it—meant our first great erring mother.
No such wholesome blunders—pleasant to recall in later, weary, well-instructed days—would be possible for Miss Edgeworth's little people if they lived in our age of pitiless enlightenment, when even a book framed for their especial joy, like The Children's Treasury of English Song, bristles with marginal notes. Here Rosamond would have found an explanation of no less than forty-eight words in the Elegy, and would probably have understood it a great deal better, and loved it a great deal
