masterpiece, "The Absentee." Macaulay pompously declared that one scene in this novel is the best thing written of its kind since the opening of the 22nd Book of the Odyssey. Yet this story, so Mrs. Edgeworth tells us, "was written under the torture of the tooth-ache, and it was only by keeping her mouth full of some strong lotion that Maria could allay the pain, and yet she never wrote with greater spirit and energy." The scene that Macaulay alludes to is that when, unknown to his tenants, the absentee landlord appears among them. The postboy, with his racy remarks, furnishes the comic part of the drama, which reads like a scene from real life, and is as fresh to-day as when it was written. Mr. Edgeworth died in June, 1817, absorbed in his daughter's books to the last. He insisted on her reading "Ormond," the story she was then engaged on, aloud to him. "He could not dine with us," wrote Maria to her aunt, Mrs. Ruxton, "but after dinner he sent for us all to the library. He sat in the arm-chair by the fire—my mother in the opposite arm-chair, Pakenham on the chair behind her, Francis on a stool at her feet, William next, Lucy, Sneyd, on the sofa opposite the fire, Honora, Fanny, Harriet, and Sophy, my aunts (the Miss Sneyds, sisters to the second and third Mrs. Edgeworth), and Lovell between them and the sofa." Would not this
