Castle Rackrent
by Maria Edgeworth
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

by

Maria Edgeworth

Macmillan and Co. in 1895

With an Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie

INTRODUCTION

I

The story of the Edgeworth Family, if it were properly told,
should be as long as the ARABIAN NIGHTS themselves; the thousand
and one cheerful intelligent members of the circle, the amusing
friends and relations, the charming surroundings, the cheerful
hospitable home, all go to make up an almost unique history of a
county family of great parts and no little character. The
Edgeworths were people of good means and position, and their
rental, we are told, amounted to nearly L3000 a year. At one
time there was some talk of a peerage for Mr. Edgeworth, but he
was considered too independent for a peerage.

The family tradition seems to have been unconventional and
spirited always. There are records still extant in the present
Mr. Edgeworth's possession,--papers of most wonderful vitality
for parchment,--where you may read passionate remonstrances and
adjurations from great-grandfathers to great-great-grandfathers,
and where great-great-grandmothers rush into the discussion with
vehement spelling and remonstrance, and make matters no better by
their interference. I never read more passionately eloquent
letters and appeals. There are also records of a pleasanter
nature; merrymakings, and festive preparations, and 12s. 6d. for
a pair of silk stockings for Miss Margaret Edgeworth to dance in,
carefully entered into the family budget. All the people whose
portraits are hanging up, beruffled, dignified, calm, and
periwigged, on the old walls of Edgeworthstown certainly had
extraordinarily strong impressions, and gave eloquent expression
to them. I don't think people could feel quite so strongly now
about their own affairs as they did then; there are so many
printed emotions, so many public events, that private details
cannot seem quite as important. Edgeworths of those days were
farther away from the world than they are now, dwelling in the
plains of Longford, which as yet were not crossed by iron rails.
The family seems to have made little of distances, and to have
ridden and posted to and fro from Dublin to Edgeworthstown in
storm and sunshine.

II

When Messrs. Macmillan asked me to write a preface to this new
edition of Miss Edgeworth's stories I thought I should like to
see the place where she had lived so long and where she had
written so much, and so it happened that being in Ireland early
this year, my daughter and I found ourselves driving up to
Broadstone Station one morning in time for the early train to
Edgeworthstown. As we got out of our cab we asked the driver
what the fare should be. 'Sure the fare is half a crown,' said
he, 'and if you wish to give me more, I could keep it for
myself!'

The train was starting and we bought our papers to beguile the
road. 'Will you have a Home Rule paper or one of them others?'
said the newsboy, with such a droll emphasis that we couldn't
help laughing. 'Give me one of each,' said I; then he laughed,
as no English newsboy would have done. . . . We went along in the
car with a sad couple of people out of a hospital, compatriots of
our own, who had been settled ten years in Ireland, and were
longing to be away. The poor things were past consolation, dull,
despairing, ingrained English, sick and suffering and yearning
for Brixton, just as other aliens long for their native hills and
moors. We travelled along together all that spring morning by
the blossoming hedges, and triumphal arches of flowering May; the
hills were very far away, but the lovely lights and scents were
all about and made our journey charming. Maynooth was a fragrant
vision as we flew past, of vast gardens wall-enclosed, of stately
buildings. The whole line of railway was sweet with the May
flowers, and with the pungent and refreshing scent of the turf-
bogs. The air was so clear and so limpid that we could see for
miles, and short-sighted eyes needed no glasses to admire with.
Here and there a turf cabin, now and then a lake placidly
reflecting the sky. The country seemed given over to silence,
the light sped unheeded across the delicate browns and greens of
the bog-fields; or lay on the sweet wonderful green of the
meadows. One dazzling field we saw full of dancing circles of
little fairy pigs with curly tails. Everything was homelike but
NOT England, there was something of France, something of Italy in
the sky; in the fanciful tints upon the land and sea, in the
vastness of the picture, in the happy sadness and calm content
which is so difficult to describe or to account for. Finally we
reached our journey's end. It gave one a real emotion to see
EDGEWORTHSTOWN written up on the board before us, and to realise
that we were following in the steps of those giants who had
passed before us. The master of Edgeworthstown kindly met us and
drove us to his home through the outlying village, shaded with
its sycamores, underneath which pretty cows were browsing the
grass. We passed the Roman Catholic Church, the great iron
crucifix standing in the churchyard. Then the horses turned in
at the gate of the park, and there rose the old home, so exactly
like what one expected it, that I felt as if I had been there
before in some other phase of existence.

It is certainly a tradition in the family to welcome travellers!
I thought of the various memoirs I had read, of the travellers
arriving from the North and the South and the West; of Scott and
Lockhart, of Pictet, of the Ticknors, of the many visitants who
had come up in turn; whether it is the year 14, or the year 94,
the hospitable doors open kindly to admit them. There were the
French windows reaching to the ground, through which Maria used
to pass on her way to gather her roses; there was the porch where
Walter Scott had stood; there grew the quaint old-fashioned
bushes with the great pink peonies in flower, by those railings
which still divide the park from the meadows beyond; there spread
the branches of the century-old trees. Only last winter they
told us the storms came and swept away a grove of Beeches that
were known in all the country round, but how much of shade, of
flower, still remain! The noble Hawthorn of stately growth, the
pine-trees (there should be NAMES for trees, as there are for
rocks or ancient strongholds). Mr. Edgeworth showed us the oak
from Jerusalem, the grove of cypress and sycamore where the
beautiful depths of ground ivy are floating upon the DEBRIS, and
soften the gnarled roots, while they flood the rising banks with
green.

Mr. and Mrs. Edgeworth brought us into the house. The ways go
upstairs and downstairs, by winding passages and side gates; a
pretty domed staircase starts from the central hall, where stands
that old clock-case which Maria wound up when she was over eighty
years old. To the right and to the left along the passages were
rooms opening from one into another. I could imagine Sir
Walter's kind eyes looking upon the scene, and Wordsworth coming
down the stairs, and their friendly entertainer making all happy,
and all welcome in turn; and their hostess, the widowed Mrs.
Edgeworth, responding and sympathising with each. We saw the
corner by the fire where Maria wrote; we saw her table with its
pretty curves standing in its place in the deep casements. Miss
Edgeworth's own room is a tiny little room above looking out on
the back garden. This little closet opens from a larger one, and
then by a narrow flight of stairs leads to a suite of ground-
floor chambers, following one from another, lined with bookcases
and looking on the gardens. What a strange fellow-feeling with
the past it gave one to stand staring at the old books, with
their paper backs and old-fashioned covers, at the gray boards,
which were the liveries of literature in those early days; at the
first editions, with their inscriptions in the author's
handwriting, or in Maria's pretty caligraphy. There was the
PIRATE in its original volumes, and Mackintosh's MEMOIRS, and
Mrs. Barbauld's ESSAYS, and Descartes's ESSAYS, that Arthur
Hallam liked to read; Hallam's CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY, and
Rogers's POEMS, were there all inscribed and dedicated. Not less
interesting were the piles of Magazines that had been sent from
America. I never knew before how many Magazines existed even
those early days; we took some down at hazard and read names,
dates, and initials. . . . Storied urn and monumental bust do not
bring back the past as do the books which belong to it. Storied
urns are in churches and stone niches, far removed from the lives
of which they speak; books seem a part of our daily life, and are
like the sound of a voice just outside the door. Here they were,
as they had been read by her, stored away by her hands, and still
safely preserved, bringing back the past with, as it were, a
cheerful encouraging greeting to the present. Other relics there
are of course, but, as I say, none which touch one so vividly.
There is her silver ink-stand, the little table her father left
her on which she wrote (it had belonged to his mother before
him). There is also a curious trophy--a table which was sent to
her from Edinburgh, ornamented by promiscuous views of Italy,
curiously inappropriate to her genius; but not so the
inscription, which is quoted from Sir Walter Scott's Preface to
his Collected Edition, and which may as well be quoted here:
'WITHOUT BEING SO PRESUMPTUOUS AS TO HOPE TO EMULATE THE RICH
HUMOUR, THE PATHETIC TENDERNESS, AND ADMIRABLE TRUTH WHICH
PERVADE THE WORKS OF MY ACCOMPLISHED FRIEND,' Sir Walter wrote, I
FELT THAT SOMETHING MIGHT BE ATTEMPTED FOR MY OWN COUNTRY OF THE
SAME KIND AS THAT WHICH MISS EDGEWORTH SO FORTUNATELY ACHIEVED
FOR IRELAND.'

In the MEMOIRS of Miss Edgeworth there is a pretty account of her
sudden burst of feeling when this passage so unexpected, and so
deeply felt by her, was read out by one of her sisters, at a time
when Maria lay weak and recovering from illness in
Edgeworthstown.

Our host took us that day, among other pleasant things, for a
marvellous and delightful flight on a jaunting car, to see
something of the country. We sped through storms and sunshine,
by open moors and fields, and then by villages and little
churches, by farms where the pigs were standing at the doors to
be fed, by pretty trim cottages. The lights came and went; as
the mist lifted we could see the exquisite colours, the green,
the dazzling sweet lights on the meadows, playing upon the
meadow-sweet and elder bushes; at last we came to the lovely
glades of Carriglass. It seemed to me that we had reached an
enchanted forest amid this green sweet tangle of ivy, of
flowering summer trees, of immemorial oaks and sycamores.

A squirrel was darting up the branches of a beautiful spreading
beech-tree, a whole army of rabbits were flashing with silver
tails into the brushwood; swallows, blackbirds, peacock-
butterflies, dragonflies on the wing, a mighty sylvan life was
roaming in this lovely orderly wilderness.

The great Irish kitchen garden, belonging to the house, with its
seven miles of wall, was also not unlike a part of a fairy tale.
Its owner, Mr. Lefroy, told me that Miss Edgeworth had been
constantly there. She was a great friend of Judge Lefroy. As a
boy he remembered her driving up to the house and running up
through the great drawing-room doors to greet the Judge.

Miss Edgeworth certainly lived in a fair surrounding, and, with
Sophia Western, must have gone along the way of life heralded by
sweetest things, by the song of birds, by the gold radiance of
the buttercups, by the varied shadows of those beautiful trees
under which the cows gently tread the grass. English does not
seem exactly the language in which to write of Ireland, with its
sylvan wonders of natural beauty. Madame de Sevigne's
descriptions of her woods came to my mind. It is not a place
which delights one by its actual sensual beauty, as Italy does;
it is not as in England, where a thousand associations link one
to every scene and aspect--Ireland seems to me to contain some
unique and most impersonal charm, which is quite unwritable.

All that evening we sat talking with our hosts round the fire
(for it was cold enough for a fire), and I remembered that in
Miss Edgeworth's MEMOIRS it was described how the snow lay upon
the ground and upon the land, when the family came home in June
to take possession of Edgeworthstown.

As I put out my candle in the spacious guest-chamber I wondered
which of its past inhabitants I should wish to see standing in
the middle of the room. I must confess that the thought of the
beautiful Honora filled me with alarm, and if Miss Seward had
walked in in her pearls and satin robe I should have fled for my
life. As I lay there experimentalising upon my own emotions I
found that after all, natural simple people do not frighten one
whether dead or alive. The thought of them is ever welcome; it
is the artificial people who are sometimes one thing, sometimes
another, and who form themselves on the weaknesses and fancies of
those among whom they live, who are really terrifying.

The shadow of the bird's wing flitted across the window of my
bedroom, and the sun was shining next morning when I awoke. I
could see the cows, foot deep in the grass under the hawthorns.
After breakfast we went out into the grounds and through an
arched doorway into the kitchen garden. It might have been some
corner of Italy or the South of France; the square tower of the
granary rose high against the blue, the gray walls were hung with
messy fruit trees, pigeons were darting and flapping their wings,
gardeners were at work, the very vegetables were growing
luxuriant and romantic and edged by thick borders of violet
pansy; crossing the courtyard, we came into the village street,
also orderly and white-washed. The soft limpid air made all
things into pictures, into Turners, into Titians. A Murillo-like
boy, with dark eyes, was leaning against a wall, with his shadow,
watching us go by; strange old women, with draperies round their
heads, were coming out of their houses. We passed the Post-
Office, the village shops, with their names, the Monaghans and
Gerahtys, such as we find again in Miss Edgeworth's novels. We
heard the local politics discussed over the counter with a
certain aptness and directness which struck me very much. We
passed the boarding-house, which was not without its history--a
long low building erected by Mr. and Miss Edgeworth for a school,
where the Sandfords and Mertons of those days were to be brought
up together: a sort of foreshadowing of the High Schools of the
present. Mr. Edgeworth was, as we know, the very spirit of
progress, though his experiment did not answer at the time. At
the end of the village street, where two roads divide, we noticed
a gap in the decent roadway--a pile of ruins in a garden. A
tumble-down cottage, and beyond the cottage, a falling shed, on
the thatched roof of which a hen was clucking and scraping.
These cottages Mr. Edgeworth had, after long difficulty, bought
up and condemned as unfit for human habitation. The plans had
been considered, the orders given to build new cottages in their
place, which were to be let to the old tenants at the old rent,
but the last remaining inhabitant absolutely refused to leave; we
saw an old woman in a hood slowly crossing the road, and carrying
a pail for water; no threats or inducements would move her, not
even the sight of a neat little house, white-washed and painted,
and all ready for her to step into. Her present rent was 10d. a
week, Mr. Edgeworth told me, and she had been letting the tumble-
down shed to a large family for 1s. 4d. This sub-let was forcibly
put an end to, but the landlady still stops there, and there she
will stay until the roof tumbles down upon her head. The old
creature passed on through the sunshine, a decrepit, picturesque
figure carrying her pail to the stream, defying all the laws of
progress and political economy and civilisation in her feebleness
and determination.

Most of the women came to their doors to see us go by. They all
looked as old as the hills--some dropt curtseys, others threw up
their arms in benediction. From a cottage farther up the road
issued a strange, shy old creature, looking like a bundle of hay,
walking on bare legs. She came up with a pinch of snuff, and a
shake of the hand; she was of the family of the man who had once
saved Edgeworthstown from being destroyed by the rebels. 'Sure
it was not her father,' said old Peggy,' it was her grandfather
did it!'  So she explained, but it was hard to believe that such
an old, old creature had ever had a grandfather in the memory of
man.

The glebe lands lie beyond the village. They reach as far as the
church on its high plateau, from which you can see the Wicklow
Hills on a fine day, and the lovely shifting of the lights of the
landscape. The remains of the great pew of the Edgeworth family,
with its carved canopy of wood, is still a feature in the bare
church from which so much has been swept away. The names of the
fathers are written on the chancel walls, and a few medallions of
daughters and sisters also. In the churchyard, among green elder
bushes and tall upspringing grasses, is the square monument
erected to Mr. Edgeworth and his family; and as we stood there
the quiet place was crossed and recrossed by swallows with their
beating crescent wings.

III

Whatever one may think of Mr. Edgeworth's literary manipulations
and of his influence upon his daughter's writings, one cannot but
respect the sincere and cordial understanding which bound these
two people together, and realise the added interest in life, in
its machinery and evolutions, which Maria owed to her father's
active intelligence. Her own gift, I think, must have been one
for perceiving through the minds of others, and for realising the
value of what they in turn reflected; one is struck again and
again by the odd mixture of intuition, and of absolute matter of
fact which one finds in her writings.

It is difficult to realise, when one reads the memoirs of human
beings who loved and hated, and laughed and scolded, and wanted
things and did without them, very much as we do ourselves, that
though they thought as we do and felt as we do (only, as I have
said, with greater vehemence), they didn't LOOK like us at all;
and Mr. Edgeworth, the father of Maria Edgeworth, the 'gay
gallant,' the impetuous, ingenious, energetic gentleman, sat
writing with powdered hair and a queue, with tights and buckles,
bolt upright in a stiff chair, while his family, also bequeued
and becurled and bekerchiefed, were gathered round him in a
group, composedly attentive to his explanations, as he points to
the roll upon the table, or reads from his many MSS. and note-
books, for their edification.

To have four wives and twenty-two children, to have invented so
many machines, engines, and curricles, steeples and telegraph
posts, is more than commonly falls to the lot of one ordinary
man, but such we know was Mr. Edgeworth's history told by his own
lips.

I received by chance an old newspaper the other day, dated the
23rd July 1779. It is called the LONDON PACKET, and its news,
told with long s's and pretty curly italics, thrills one even now
as one looks over the four short pages. The leading article is
entitled 'Striking Instance of the PERFIDY of France.'  It is
true the grievance goes back to Louis XIV., but the leader is
written with plenty of spirit and present indignation. Then
comes news from America and the lists of New Councillors elected:

'Artemus Ward, Francis Dana, Oliver Prescott, Samuel Baker, while
a very suitable sermon on the occasion is preached by the Rev.
Mr. Stillman of Boston.'  How familiar the names all sound! Then
the thanks of the Members of Congress are given to 'General Lee,
Colonel Moultrie, and the officers and soldiers under their
command who on the 28th of June last Repulsed with so much Valour
the attack that was made that day on the State of South Carolina
by the fleet and army of his Britannic Majesty.'

There is an irresistible spirit of old-world pigtail decorum and
dash about it all. We read of our 'grand fleet' waiting at
Corunna for the Spanish; of 80,000 men on the coast of Brittany
supposed to be ready for an invasion of England; of the Prince of
Conde playing at cards, with Northumberland House itself for
stakes (Northumberland House which he is INTENDING to take). We
read the list of Lottery Prizes, of the L1000 and L500 tickets;
of the pressing want of seamen for His Majesty's Navy, and how
the gentlemen of Ireland are subscribers to a bounty fund. Then
comes the narrative of James Caton of Bristol, who writes to
complain that while transacting his business on the Bristol
Exchange he is violently seized by a pressgang, with oaths and
imprecations. Mr. Farr, attempting to speak to him, is told by
the Lieutenant that if he does not keep off he will be shot with
a pistol. Mr. Caton is violently carried off, locked up in a
horrible stinking room, prevented from seeing his friends; after
a day or two he is forced on board a tender, where Mr. Tripp, a
midshipman, behaves with humanity, but the Captain and Lieutenant
outvie each other in brutality; Captain Hamilton behaving as an
'enraged partisan.'  Poor Mr. Caton is released at last by the
exertions of Mr. Edmund Burke, of Mr. Farr, and another devoted
friend, who travel post-haste to London to obtain a Habeas
Corpus, so that he is able to write indignantly and safe from his
own home to the LONDON PACKET to describe his providential
escape. The little sheet gives one a vivid impression of that
daily life in 1779, when Miss Edgeworth must have been a little
girl of twelve years old, at school at Mrs. Lataffiere's, and
learning to write in her beautiful handwriting. It was a time of
great events. The world is fighting, armies marching and
counter-marching, and countries rapidly changing hands. Miss
Seward is inditing her elegant descriptions for the use of her
admiring circle. But already the circle is dwindling! Mr. Day
has parted from Sabrina. The well-known episodes of Lichfield
gaieties and love-makings are over. Poor Major Andre has been
exiled from England and rejected by Honora. The beautiful
Honora, whose "blending charms of mind and person" are celebrated
by one adoring lover after another, has married Mr. Edgeworth.
She has known happiness, and the devoted affection of an adoring
husband, and the admiring love of her little step-daughter, all
this had been hers; and now all this is coming to an end, and the
poor lady lying on her death-bed imploring her husband to marry
her sister Elizabeth. Accordingly Mr. Edgeworth married
Elizabeth Sneyd in 1780, which was also the year of poor Andre's
death.

There is a little oval picture at the National Gallery in Dublin,
the photograph of a sketch at Edgeworthstown House, which gives
one a very good impression of the family as it must have appeared
in the reigns of King George and the third Mrs. Edgeworth. The
father in his powder and frills sits at the table with
intelligent, well-informed finger showing some place upon a map.
He is an agreeable-looking youngish man; Mrs. Edgeworth, his
third wife, is looking over his shoulder; she has marked
features, beautiful eyes, she holds a child upon her knee, and
one can see the likeness in her to her step-daughter Honora, who
stands just behind her and leans against the chair. A large
globe appropriately stands in the background. The grown-up
ladies alternate with small children. Miss Edgeworth herself,
sitting opposite to her father, is the most prominent figure in
the group. She wears a broad leghorn hat, a frizzed coiffure,
and folded kerchief; she has a sprightly, somewhat French
appearance, with a marked nose of the RETROUSSE order. I had so
often heard that she was plain that to see this fashionable and
agreeable figure was a pleasant surprise.

Miss Edgeworth seems to be about four-and-twenty in the sketch;
she was born in 1767; she must have been eleven in 1778, when Mr.
Edgeworth finally came over to Ireland to settle on his own
estate, and among his own people. He had been obliged some years
before to leave Edgeworthstown on account of Mrs. Honora
Edgeworth's health; he now returned in patriarchal fashion with
Mrs. Elizabeth Edgeworth, his third wife, with his children by
his first, second, and third marriages, and with two sisters-in-
law who had made their home in his family. For thirty-five years
he continued to live on in the pretty old home which he now
adapted to his large family, and which, notwithstanding Miss
Edgeworth's objections, would have seemed so well fitted for its
various requirements. The daughter's description of his life
there, of his work among his tenants, of his paternal and
spirited rule, is vivid and interesting. When the present owner
of Edgeworthstown talked to us of his grandfather, one felt that,
with all his eccentricities, he must have been a man of a far-
seeing mind and observation. Mr. Erroles Edgeworth said that he
was himself still reaping the benefit of his grandfather's
admirable organisation and arrangements on the estate, and that
when people all around met with endless difficulties and
complications, he had scarcely known any. Would that there had
been more Mr. Edgeworths in Ireland!

Whatever business he had to do, his daughter tells us, was done
in the midst of his family. Maria copied his letters of business
and helped him to receive his rents. 'On most Irish estates,'
says Miss Edgeworth, 'there is, or there was, a personage
commonly called a driver,--a person who drives and impounds
cattle for rent and arrears.'  The drivers are, alas! from time
to time too necessary in collecting Irish rents. Mr. Edgeworth
desired that none of his tenants should pay rent to any one but
himself; thus taking away subordinate interference, he became
individually acquainted with his tenantry. He also made himself
acquainted with the different value of land on his estate. In
every case where the tenant had improved the land his claim to
preference over every new proposer was admitted. The mere plea,
'I have been on your Honour's estate so many years,' was
disregarded. 'Nor was it advantageous that each son,' says Miss
Edgeworth, 'of the original tenant should live on his subdivided
little potato garden without further exertion of mind or body.'
Further on she continues: 'Not being in want of ready money, my
father was not obliged to let his land to the highest bidder. He
could afford to have good tenants.'  In the old leases claims of
duty-fowl, of duty-work, of man or beast had been inserted. Mr.
Edgeworth was one of the first to abolish them. The only clause
he continued in every lease was the alienation fine, which was to
protect the landlord and to prevent a set of middlemen from
taking land at a reasonable rent, and letting it immediately at
the highest possible price. His indulgence as to the time he
allowed for the payment of rent was unusually great, but beyond
the half year the tenants knew his strictness so well, that they
rarely ventured to go into arrears, and never did so with
impunity. 'To his character as a good landlord,' she continues,
'was added that he was a real gentleman; this phrase comprises a
good deal in the opinion of the lower Irish.'  There is one very
curious paragraph in which Miss Edgeworth describes how her
father knew how to make use of the tenants' prejudices, putting
forward his wishes rather than his convictions. 'It would be
impossible for me,' says his daughter, 'without ostentation to
give any of the proofs I might record of my father's liberality.
Long after they were forgotten by himself, they were remembered
by the warm-hearted people among whom he lived.'

Mr. Edgeworth was one of those people born to get their own way.
Every one seems to have felt the influence of his strong
character. It was not only with his family and his friends that
he held his own--the tenants and the poor people rallied to his
command. To be sure, it sounds like some old Irish legend to be
told that Mr. Edgeworth had so loud a voice that it could be
heard a mile off, and that his steward, who lived in a lodge at
that distance from the house, could hear him calling from the
drawing-room window, and would come up for orders.

In 1778, says Miss Edgeworth retrospectively, when England was
despatching her armies all over the world, she had no troops to
spare for the defence of Ireland then threatened with a French
invasion; and the principal nobility and gentry embodied
themselves volunteers for the defence of the country. The Duke
of Leinster and Lord Charlemont were at the head of the 'corps
which in perfect order and good discipline rendered their country
respectable.'  The friends of Ireland, profiting by England's
growing consideration for the sister country, now obtained for
her great benefits for which they had long been striving, and Mr.
Grattan moved an address to the throne asserting the legislative
independence of Ireland. The address passed the House, and, as
his daughter tells us, Mr. Edgeworth immediately published a
pamphlet. Miss Edgeworth continues as follows, describing his
excellent course of action: 'My father honestly and
unostentatiously used his utmost endeavours to obliterate all
that could tend to perpetuate ill-will in the country. Among the
lower classes in his neighbourhood he endeavoured to discourage
that spirit of recrimination and retaliation which the lower
Irish are too prone to cherish. They are such acute observers
that there is no deceiving them as to the state of the real
feeling of their superiors. They know the signs of what passes
within with more certainty than any physiognomist, and it was
soon seen by all those who had any connection with him that my
father was sincere in his disdain of vengeance.'  Further on,
describing his political feelings, she says that on the subject
of the Union in parliamentary phrase he had not then been able to
make up his mind. She describes with some pride his first speech
in the Irish House at two o'clock in the morning, when the
wearied members were scarcely awake to hear it, and when some of
the outstretched members were aroused by their neighbours to
listen to him! 'When people perceived that it was not a set
speech,' says Miss Edgeworth, 'they became interested.'  He
stated his doubts just as they had occurred as he threw them by
turn into each scale. After giving many reasons in favour of
what appeared to be the advantages of the Union, he unexpectedly
gave his vote against it, because he said he had been convinced
by what he had heard one night, that the Union was decidedly
against the wishes of the majority of men of sense and property
in the nation. He added (and surely Mr. Edgeworth's opinion
should go for something still) that if he should be convinced
that the opinions of the country changed, his vote would be in
its favour.

His biographer tells us that Mr. Edgeworth was much complimented
on his speech by BOTH sides, by those for whom he voted, and also
by those who found that the best arguments on the other side of
the question had been undoubtedly made by him. It is a somewhat
complicated statement and state of feeling to follow; to the
faithful daughter nothing is impossible where her father is
concerned. This vote, I believe, cost Mr. Edgeworth his peerage.
'When it was known that he had voted against the Union he became
suddenly the idol of those who would previously have stoned him,'
says his devoted biographer. It must not, however, be forgotten
that Mr. Edgeworth had refused an offer of L3000 for his seat for
two or three weeks, during that momentous period when every vote
was of importance. Mr. Pitt, they say, spent over L2,000,000 in
carrying the measure which he deemed so necessary.

IV

As a rule people's books appeal first to one's imagination, and
then after a time, if the books are good books and alive, not
stuffed dummies and reproductions, one begins to divine the
writers themselves, hidden away in their pages, and wrapped up in
their hot-press sheets of paper; and so it happened by chance
that a printed letter once written by Maria Edgeworth to Mrs.
Barbauld set the present reader wondering about these two
familiar names, and trying to realise the human beings which they
each represented. Since those days Miss Edgeworth has become a
personage more vivid and interesting than any of her characters,
more familiar even than 'Simple Susan' or 'Rosamond of the Purple
Jar.'  She has seemed little by little to grow into a friend, as
the writer has learnt to know her more and more intimately, has
visited the home of that home-loving woman, has held in her hands
the delightful Family Memoirs, has seen the horizons, so to
speak, of Maria Edgeworth's long life. [Now published and edited
by  Mr. Hare (Nov. 1894).]  Several histories of Miss Edgeworth
have been lately published in England. Miss Zimmern and Miss
Oliver in America have each written, and the present writer has
written, and various memoirs and letters have appeared in
different magazines and papers with allusions and descriptions
all more or less interesting. One can but admire the spirit
which animated that whole existence; the cheerful, kindly,
multiplied interest Maria Edgeworth took in the world outside, as
well as in the wellbeing of all those around her. Generations,
changes, new families, new experiences, none of these overwhelmed
her. She seemed to move in a crowd, a cheerful, orderly crowd,
keeping in tune and heart with its thousand claims; with strength
and calmness of mind to bear multiplied sorrows and a variety of
care with courage, and an ever-reviving gift of spirited
interest. Her history is almost unique in its curious
relationships; its changes of step-mothers, its warm family ties,
its grasp of certain facts which belong to all time rather than
to the hour itself. Miss Edgeworth lived for over eighty years,
busy, beneficent, modest, and intelligent to the last. When she
died she was mourned as unmarried women of eighty are not often
mourned.

The present owner of Edgeworthstown told us that he could just
remember her, lying dead upon her bed, and her face upon the
pillow, and the sorrowful tears of the household; and how he and
the other little children were carried off by a weeping aunt into
the woods, to comfort and distract them on the funeral day. He
also told us of an incident prior to this event which should not
be overlooked. How he himself, being caught red-handed, at the
age of four or thereabouts, with his hands in a box of sugar-
plums, had immediately confessed the awful fact that he had been
about to eat them, and he was brought then and there before his
Aunt Maria for sentence. She at once decided that he had behaved
Nobly in speaking the truth, and that he must be rewarded in kind
for his praiseworthy conduct, and be allowed to keep the sugar-
plums!

This little story after half a century certainly gives one
pleasure still to recall, and proves, I think, that cakes may be
enjoyed long after they have been eaten, and also that there is a
great deal to be said for justice with lollipops in the scale.
But what would Rosamond's parents have thought of such a
decision? One shudders to think of their disapproval, or of that
of dear impossible Mr. Thomas Day, with his trials and
experiments of melted sealing-wax upon little girls' bare arms,
and his glasses of tar-water so inflexibly administered. Miss
Edgeworth, who suffered from her eyes, recalls how Mr. Day used
to bring the dose, the horrible tar-water, every morning with a
'Drink this, Miss Maria!'  and how she dared not resist, though
she thought she saw something of kindness and pity beneath all
his apparent severity.

Severity was the order of those times. The reign of sugar-plums
had scarcely begun. It was not, as now, only ignorance and
fanaticism that encouraged the giving of pain, it was the
universal custom. People were still hanged for stealing, women
were still burnt--so we have been assured--in St. Stephen's
Green; though, it is true, they were considerately strangled
first. Children were bullied and tortured with the kindest
intentions; even Maria Edgeworth at her fashionable school was
stretched in a sort of machine to make her grow; Mr. Day, as we
know, to please the lady of his affections, passed eight hours a
day in the stocks in order to turn out his knock-knees. One
feels that a generation of ladies and gentlemen who submitted to
such inflictions surely belonged to a race of heroes and
heroines, and that, if the times were difficult and trying, the
people also were stronger to endure them, and must have been much
better fitted with nerves than we are.

Miss Edgeworth's life has been so often told that I will not
attempt to recapitulate the story at any length. She well
deserved her reputation. Her thoughts were good, her English was
good, her stories had the charm of sincerity, and her audience of
children was a genuine audience, less likely to be carried away
by fashion than more advanced critics might be. There is a
curious matter-of-fact element in all she wrote, combined with
extraordinary quickness and cleverness; and it must be
remembered, in trying to measure her place in literature, that in
her day the whole great school of English philosophical romance
was in its cradle; George Eliot was not in existence; my father
was born in the year in which THE ABSENTEE was published. Sir
Walter Scott has told us that it was Miss Edgeworth's writing
which first suggested to him the idea of writing about Scotland
and its national life. Tourgenieff in the same way says that it
was after reading her books on Ireland that he began to write of
his own country and of Russian peasants as he did. Miss
Edgeworth was the creator of her own special world of fiction,
though the active Mr. Edgeworth crossed the t's and dotted the
i's, interpolated, expurgated, to his own and Maria's
satisfaction. She was essentially a modest woman; she gratefully
accepted his criticism and emendations. Mr. Clark Russell quotes
Sydney Smith, who declared that Mr. Edgeworth must have written
or burst. 'A discharge of ink was an evacuation absolutely
necessary to avoid fatal and plethoric congestion.'  The only
wonder is that, considering all they went through, his daughter's
stories survived to tell their tale, and to tell it so well, with
directness and conviction, that best of salt in any literary
work. A letter Maria wrote to her cousin will be remembered. 'I
beg, dear Sophy,' she says, 'that you will not call my stories by
the sublime name of my works; I shall else be ashamed when the
little mouse comes forth.'

Maria's correspondence is delightful, and conveys us right away
into that bygone age. The figures rapidly move across her scene,
talking and unconsciously describing themselves as they go; you
see them all through the eyes of the observant little lady. She
did not go very deep; she seems to me to have made kindly
acquaintance with some, to have admired others with artless
enthusiasm. I don't think she troubled herself much about
complication of feeling; she liked people to make repartees, or
to invent machines, to pay their bills, and to do their duty in a
commonplace and cheerfully stoical fashion. But then Maria
Edgeworth certainly did not belong to our modern schools, sipping
the emetic goblet to give flavour to daily events, nor to that
still more alarming and spreading clique of DEGENERES who insist
upon administering such doses to others to relieve the tedium of
the road of life.

Perhaps we in our time scarcely do justice to Miss Edgeworth's
extraordinary cleverness and brightness of apprehension. There
is more fun than humour in her work, and those were the days of
good rollicking jokes and laughter. Details change so quickly
that it is almost impossible to grasp entirely the aims and
intentions of a whole set of people just a little different from
ourselves in every single thing; who held their heads
differently, who pointed their toes differently, who addressed
each other in a language just a little unlike our own. The very
meanings of the words shift from one generation to another, and
we are perhaps more really in harmony with our great-great-
grandfathers than with the more immediate generations.

Her society was charming, so every one agrees; and her
acquaintance with all the most remarkable men of her time must
not be forgotten, nor the genuine regard with which she inspired
all who came across her path.

'In external appearance she is quite the fairy of our nursery
tale, the WHIPPETY STOURIE, if you remember such a sprite, who
came flying through the window to work all sorts of marvels,'
writes Sir Walter. 'I will never believe but what she has a wand
in her pocket, and pulls it out to conjure a little before she
begins those very striking pictures of manners.'

Among others Sir William Hamilton has left a pleasing description
of Miss Edgeworth. 'If you would study and admire her as she
deserves, you must see her at home,' says he, 'and hear her talk.
She knows an infinite number of anecdotes about interesting
places and persons, which she tells extremely well, and never
except when they arise naturally out of the subject. . . . To
crown her merits, she seemed to take a prodigious fancy to me,
and promised to be at home, and made me promise to be at
Edgeworthstown for a fortnight some time next vacation.'  We owe
to him also an amusing sketch of some other collateral members of
the family; the fine animated old lady, who immediately gets him
to explain the reason why a concave mirror inverts while a convex
mirror leaves them erect; the young ladies, one of whom was
particularly anxious to persuade him that the roundness of the
planets was produced by friction, perhaps by their being shaken
together like marbles in a bag.

There is also an interesting letter from Sir W. Hamilton at
Edgeworthstown on 23rd September 1829. Wordsworth is also
staying there. 'After some persuasion Francis and I succeed in
engaging Mr. Wordsworth in many very interesting conversations.
Miss Edgeworth has had for some time a very serious illness, but
she was able to join us for dinner the day that I arrived, and
she exhibited in her conversations with Mr. Wordsworth a good
deal of her usual brilliancy; she also engaged Mr. Marshall in
some long conversations upon Ireland, and even Mr. Marshall's
son, whose talent for silence seems to be so very profound, was
thawed a little on Monday evening, and discussed after tea the
formation of the solar system. Miss Edgeworth tells me that she
is at last employed in writing for the public after a long
interval, but does not expect to have her work soon ready for
publication.'  [There is a curious criticism of Miss Edgeworth by
Robert Hall, the great preacher, which should not be passed over.
'As to her style,' he says, 'she is simple and elegant, content
to convey her thoughts in their most plain and natural form, that
is indeed the perfection of style. . . . In point of tendency,'
he continues, 'I should class her books among the most
irreligious I ever read. . . . She does not attack religion nor
inveigh against it, but makes it appear unnecessary by exhibiting
perfect virtue without it. . . . No works ever produced so bad an
effect on my own mind as hers.']

Besides Wordsworth and Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Marshall, we
presently come to Sir John Herschell. 'I saw your admirable
friend Miss Edgeworth lately in town,' he writes to Hamilton;
'she is a most warm admirer of yours, and praise such as hers is
what any man might be proud of.'  Later on Miss Edgeworth,
corresponding with Sir W. Hamilton, tells him she is ill and
forbidden to write, or even to think. This is what she thinks of
THINKING: 'I am glad to see that the severe sciences do not
destroy the energy and grace of the imagination, but only chasten
it and impart their philosophical influence.'

V

Certain events are remembered and mourned for generations, so
there are others, happy and interesting in themselves, which must
continue to give satisfaction long after they are over, and long
after those concerned in them have passed away. And certainly
among things pleasant to remember is the story of Sir Walter
Scott's visit to Ireland in July 1825, when he received so warm a
greeting from the country and spent those happy hours with Miss
Edgeworth at Edgeworthstown. Fortunately for us, Lockhart was
one of the party. Anne Scott, and Walter the soldier, and Jane
Scott the bride, were also travelling in Sir Walter's train. The
reception which Ireland gave Sir Walter was a warm-hearted
ovation. 'It would be endless to enumerate the distinguished
persons who, morning after morning, crowded to his levee in St.
Stephen's Green,' says Lockhart, and he quotes an old saying of
Sir Robert Peel's, 'that Sir Walter's reception in the High
Street of Edinburgh is 1822 was the first thing that gave him
(Peel) a notion of the electric shock of a nation's gratitude.'
'I doubt if even that scene surpassed what I myself witnessed,'
continues the biographer, 'when Sir Walter returned down Dame
Street after inspecting the Castle of Dublin.'

From ovations to friendship it was Sir Walter's inclination to
turn. On the 1st August he came to Edgeworthstown, accompanied
by his family. 'We remained there for several days, making
excursions to Loch Oel, etc. Mr. Lovell Edgeworth had his
classical mansion filled every evening with a succession of
distinguished friends. Here, above all, we had the opportunity
of seeing in what universal respect and comfort a gentleman's
family may live in that country, provided only they live there
habitually and do their duty. . . . Here we found neither mud
hovels nor naked peasantry, but snug cottages and smiling faces
all about. . . . Here too we pleased ourselves with recognising
some of the sweetest features in Goldsmith's picture of "Sweet
Auburn! loveliest village of the plain."' Oliver Goldsmith
received his education at this very school of Edgeworthstown, and
Pallas More, the little hamlet where the author of THE VICAR OF
WAKEFIELD first saw the light, is still, as it was then, the
property of the Edgeworths.

So Scott came to visit his little friend, and the giant was
cheered and made welcome by her charming hospitality. It was a
last gleam of sunshine in that noble life. We instinctively feel
how happy they all were in each other's good company. We can
almost overhear some of their talk, as they walk together under
the shade of the trees of the park. One can imagine him laughing
in his delightful hearty way, half joking, half caressing.
Lockhart had used some phrase (it is Lockhart who tells us the
story) which conveyed the impression that he suspects poets and
novelists of looking at life and at the world chiefly as
materials for art. 'A soft and pensive shade came over Scott's
face. "I fear you have some very young ideas in your head," he
says. "God help us, what a poor world this would be if that were
the true doctrine! I have read books enough, and observed and
conversed with enough eminent minds in my time, but I assure you
I have heard higher sentiments from the lips of poor uneducated
men and women, exerting the spirit of severe yet gentle heroism,
or speaking their simple thoughts, than I ever met with out of
the pages of the Bible. We shall never learn to feel and respect
our real calling unless we have taught ourselves to consider
everything as moonshine compared with the education of the
heart,"' said the great teacher. 'Maria did not listen to this
without some water in her eyes,--her tears are always ready when
a generous string is touched,--but she brushed them gaily aside,
and said, "You see how it is: Dean Swift said he had written his
books in order that people should learn to treat him like a great
lord; Sir Walter writes his in order that he might be able to
treat his people as a great lord ought to do."'

Years and years afterwards Edward Fitzgerald stayed at
Edgeworthstown, and he also carries us there in one of his
letters. He had been at college with Mr. Frank Edgeworth, who
had succeeded to the estate, and had now in 1828 come to stay
with him. The host had been called away, but the guest describes
his many hostesses: 'Edgeworth's mother, aged seventy-four; his
sister, the great Maria, aged seventy-two; and another cousin or
something. All these people were pleasant and kind, the house
pleasant, the grounds ditto, a good library, so here I am quite
at home, but surely must go to England soon.'  One can imagine
Fitzgerald sitting in the library with his back to the window and
writing his letters and reading his thirty-two sets of novels,
while the rain is steadily pouring outside, and the Great
Authoress (so he writes her down) as busy as a bee sitting by
chattering and making a catalogue of her books. 'We talk about
Walter Scott, whom she adores, and are merry all day long,' he
says. 'When I began this letter I thought I had something to
say, but I believe the truth was I had nothing to do.'

Two years later Mr. Fitzgerald is again there and writing to
Frederick Tennyson: 'I set sail from Dublin to-morrow night,
bearing the heartfelt regrets of all the people of Ireland with
me.'  Then comes a flash of his kind searching lantern: 'I had a
pleasant week with Edgeworth. He farms and is a justice, and
goes to sleep on the sofa of evenings. At odd moments he looks
into Spinoza and Petrarch. People respect him very much in these
parts.'  Edward Fitzgerald seems to have had a great regard for
his host; the more he knows him the more he cares for him; he
describes him 'firing away about the odes of Pindar.'  They fired
noble broadsides those men of the early Victorian times, and when
we listen we still seem to hear their echoes rolling into the far
distance. Mr. Fitzgerald ends his letter with a foreboding too
soon to be realised: 'Old Miss Edgeworth is wearing away. She
has a capital bright soul, which even now shines quite youthfully
through her faded carcase.'  It was in May 1849 that Maria
Edgeworth went to her rest. She died almost suddenly, with no
long suffering, in the arms of her faithful friend and step-
mother.

*

NOTES ON 'CASTLE RACKRENT'

In 1799, When Maria was in London, she and her father went to
call upon Mr. Johnson, the bookseller, who was then imprisoned in
the King's Bench for a publication which was considered to be
treasonable, and they probably then and there arranged with him
for the publication of CASTLE RACKRENT, for in January 1800,
writing to her cousin, Miss Ruxton, Maria says, 'Will you tell me
what means you have of getting parcels from London to Arundel,
because I wish to send my aunt a few popular tales. . . . We have
begged Johnson to send CASTLE RACKRENT, and hope it has reached
you. DO NOT MENTION THAT IT IS OURS.'

The second edition of CASTLE RACKRENT came out with Miss
Edgeworth's name to it in 1811. 'Its success was so triumphant,'
Mrs. Edgeworth writes,'that some one--I heard his name at the
time, but do not now remember it--not only asserted that he was
the author, but actually took the trouble to copy out several
chapters with corrections and erasions as if it was his original
manuscript.'

It was when Miss Edgeworth first came to Ireland,--so she tells
one of her correspondents,--that she met the original Thady of
CASTLE RACKRENT. His character struck her very much, and the
story came into her mind. She purposely added to the agent's age
so as to give time for the events to happen.

Honest Thady tells the story; you can almost hear his voice, and
see him as he stands: 'I wear a long greatcoat winter and summer,
which is very handy, as I never put my arms into the sleeves;
they are as good as new, though come Holantide next I've had it
these seven years: it holds on by a single button round my neck,
cloak fashion. To look at me, you would hardly think "Poor
Thady" was the father of Attorney Quirk; he is a high gentleman,
and never minds what poor Thady says, and having better than
fifteen hundred a year landed estate, looks down upon honest
Thady; but I wash my hands of his doings, and as I have lived, so
will I die, true and loyal to the family. The family of
Rackrents is, I am proud to say, one of the most ancient in the
kingdom.'  And then he gives the history of the Rackrents,
beginning with Sir Patrick, who could sit out the best man in
Ireland, let alone the three kingdoms itself, and who fitted up
the chicken-house to accommodate his friends when they honoured
him unexpectedly with their company. There was 'such a fine
whillaluh at Sir Patrick's funeral, you might have heard it to
the farthest end of the county, and happy the man who could get
but a sight of the hearse.'  Then came Sir Murtagh, who used to
boast that he had a law-suit for every letter in the alphabet.
'He dug up a fairy-mount against my advice,' says Thady, 'and had
no luck afterwards. . . . Sir Murtagh in his passion broke a
blood-vessel, and all the law in the land could do nothing in
that case. . . . My lady had a fine jointure settled upon her,
and took herself away, to the great joy of the tenantry. I never
said anything one way or the other,' says Thady, 'whilst she was
part of the family, but got up to see her go at three o'clock in
the morning. "It's a fine morning, honest Thady," says she;
"good-bye to ye," and into the carriage she stepped, without a
word more, good or bad, or even half-a-crown, but I made my bow,
and stood to see her safe out of sight for the sake of the
family.'

How marvellously vivid it all is! every word tells as the
generations pass before us. The very spirit of romantic Irish
fidelity is incarnate in Thady. Jason Quirk represents the
feline element, which also belongs to our extraordinary Celtic
race. The little volume contains the history of a nation. It is
a masterpiece which Miss Edgeworth has never surpassed. It is
almost provoking to have so many details of other and less
interesting stories, such as EARLY LESSONS, A KNAPSACK, THE
PRUSSIAN VASE, etc., and to hear so little of these two books by
which she will be best remembered.

*

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

The Prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been
censured and ridiculed by critics who aspire to the character of
superior wisdom; but if we consider it in a proper point of view,
this taste is an incontestable proof of the good sense and
profoundly philosophic temper of the present times. Of the
numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive
any advantage from their labours! The heroes of history are so
decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian; they
talk in such measured prose, and act from such sublime or such
diabolical motives, that few have sufficient taste, wickedness,
or heroism, to sympathise in their fate. Besides, there is much
uncertainty even in the best authenticated ancient or modern
histories; and that love of truth, which in some minds is innate
and immutable, necessarily leads to a love of secret memoirs and
private anecdotes. We cannot judge either of the feelings or of
the characters of men with perfect accuracy, from their actions
or their appearance in public; it is from their careless
conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope
with the greatest probability of success to discover their real
characters. The life of a great or of a little man written by
himself, the familiar letters, the diary of any individual
published by his friends or by his enemies, after his decease,
are esteemed important literary curiosities. We are surely
justified, in this eager desire, to collect the most minute facts
relative to the domestic lives, not only of the great and good,
but even of the worthless and insignificant, since it is only by
a comparison of their actual happiness or misery in the privacy
of domestic life that we can form a just estimate of the real
reward of virtue, or the real punishment of vice. That the great
are not as happy as they seem, that the external circumstances of
fortune and rank do not constitute felicity, is asserted by every
moralist: the historian can seldom, consistently with his
dignity, pause to illustrate this truth; it is therefore to the
biographer we must have recourse. After we have beheld splendid
characters playing their parts on the great theatre of the world,
with all the advantages of stage effect and decoration, we
anxiously beg to be admitted behind the scenes, that we may take
a nearer view of the actors and actresses.

Some may perhaps imagine that the value of biography depends upon
the judgment and taste of the biographer; but on the contrary it
may be maintained, that the merits of a biographer are inversely
as the extent of his intellectual powers and of his literary
talents. A plain unvarnished tale is preferable to the most
highly ornamented narrative. Where we see that a man has the
power, we may naturally suspect that he has the will to deceive
us; and those who are used to literary manufacture know how much
is often sacrificed to the rounding of a period, or the pointing
of an antithesis.

That the ignorant may have their prejudices as well as the
learned cannot be disputed; but we see and despise vulgar errors:
we never bow to the authority of him who has no great name to
sanction his absurdities. The partiality which blinds a
biographer to the defects of his hero, in proportion as it is
gross, ceases to be dangerous; but if it be concealed by the
appearance of candour, which men of great abilities best know how
to assume, it endangers our judgment sometimes, and sometimes our
morals. If her Grace the Duchess of Newcastle, instead of
penning her lord's elaborate eulogium, had undertaken to write
the life of Savage, we should not have been in any danger of
mistaking an idle, ungrateful libertine for a man of genius and
virtue. The talents of a biographer are often fatal to his
reader. For these reasons the public often judiciously
countenance those who, without sagacity to discriminate
character, without elegance of style to relieve the tediousness
of narrative, without enlargement of mind to draw any conclusions
from the facts they relate, simply pour forth anecdotes, and
retail conversations, with all the minute prolixity of a gossip
in a country town.

The author of the following Memoirs has upon these grounds fair
claims to the public favour and attention; he was an illiterate
old steward, whose partiality to THE FAMILY, in which he was bred
and born, must be obvious to the reader. He tells the history of
the Rackrent family in his vernacular idiom, and in the full
confidence that Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy
Rackrent's affairs will be as interesting to all the world as
they were to himself. Those who were acquainted with the manners
of a certain class of the gentry of Ireland some years ago, will
want no evidence of the truth of honest Thady's narrative; to
those who are totally unacquainted with Ireland, the following
Memoirs will perhaps be scarcely intelligible, or probably they
may appear perfectly incredible. For the information of the
IGNORANT English reader, a few notes have been subjoined by the
editor, and he had it once in contemplation to translate the
language of Thady into plain English; but Thady's idiom is
incapable of translation, and, besides, the authenticity of his
story would have been more exposed to doubt if it were not told
in his own characteristic manner. Several years ago he related
to the editor the history of the Rackrent family, and it was with
some difficulty that he was persuaded to have it committed to
writing; however, his feelings for 'THE HONOUR OF THE FAMILY,' as
he expressed himself, prevailed over his habitual laziness, and
he at length completed the narrative which is now laid before the
public.

The editor hopes his readers will observe that these are 'tales
of other times;' that the manners depicted in the following pages
are not those of the present age; the race of the Rackrents has
long since been extinct in Ireland; and the drunken Sir Patrick,
the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly
Sir Condy, are characters which could no more be met with at
present in Ireland, than Squire Western or Parson Trulliber in
England. There is a time when individuals can bear to be rallied
for their past follies and absurdities, after they have acquired
new habits and a new consciousness. Nations, as well as
individuals, gradually lose attachment to their identity, and the
present generation is amused, rather than offended, by the
ridicule that is thrown upon its ancestors.

Probably we shall soon have it in our power, in a hundred
instances, to verify the truth of these observations.

When Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain,
she will look back, with a smile of good-humoured complacency, on
the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence.

1800.

*

CASTLE RACKRENT

MONDAY MORNING [See GLOSSARY 1].

Having, out of friendship for the family, upon whose estate,
praised be Heaven! I and mine have lived rent-free time out of
mind, voluntarily undertaken to publish the MEMOIRS OF THE
RACKRENT FAMILY, I think it my duty to say a few words, in the
first place, concerning myself. My real name is Thady Quirk,
though in the family I have always been known by no other than
'Honest Thady,' afterward, in the time of Sir Murtagh, deceased,
I remember to hear them calling me 'Old. Thady,' and now I've
come to 'Poor Thady'; for I wear a long greatcoat winter and
summer, which is very handy, as I never put my arms into the
sleeves; they are as good as new, though come Holantide next I've
had it these seven years: it holds on by a single button round
my neck, cloak fashion.

[The cloak, or mantle, as described by Thady, is of high
antiquity. Spenser, in his VIEW OF THE STATE OF IRELAND, proves
that it is not, as some have imagined, peculiarly derived from
the Scythians, but that 'most nations of the world anciently used
the mantle; for the Jews used it, as you may read of Elias's
mantle, etc.; the Chaldees also used it, as you may read in
Diodorus; the Egyptians likewise used it, as you may read in
Herodotus, and may be gathered by the description of Berenice in
the Greek Commentary upon Callimachus; the Greeks also used it
anciently, as appeared by Venus's mantle lined with stars, though
afterward they changed the form thereof into their cloaks, called
Pallai, as some of the Irish also use; and the ancient Latins and
Romans used it, as you may read in Virgil, who was a great
antiquary, that Evander, when AEneas came to him at his feast,
did entertain and feast him sitting on the ground, and lying on
mantles: insomuch that he useth the very word mantile for a
mantle--

"Humi mantilia sternunt:"

so that it seemeth that the mantle was a general habit to most
nations, and not proper to the Scythians only.

Spenser knew the convenience of the said mantle, as housing,
bedding, and clothing:
'IREN. Because the commodity doth not countervail the
discommodity; for the inconveniences which thereby do arise are
much more many; for it is a fit house for an outlaw, a meet bed
for a rebel, and an apt cloak for a thief. First, the outlaw
being, for his many crimes and villanies, banished from the towns
and houses of honest men, and wandering in waste places, far from
danger of law, maketh his mantle his house, and under it covereth
himself from the wrath of Heaven, from the offence of the earth,
and from the sight of men. When it raineth, it is his penthouse;
when it bloweth, it is his tent; when it freezeth, it is his
tabernacle. In summer he can wear it loose; in winter he can
wrap it close; at all times he can use it; never heavy, never
cumbersome. Likewise for a rebel it is as serviceable; for in
this war that he maketh (if at least it deserves the name of
war), when he still flieth from his foe, and lurketh in the THICK
WOODS (this should be BLACK BOGS) and straight passages, waiting
for advantages, it is his bed, yea, and almost his household
stuff.']

To look at me, you would hardly think 'Poor Thady' was the father
of Attorney Quirk; he is a high gentleman, and never minds what
poor Thady says, and having better than fifteen hundred a year,
landed estate, looks down upon honest Thady; but I wash my hands
of his doings, and as I have lived so will I die, true and loyal
to the family. The family of the Rackrents is, I am proud to
say, one of the most ancient in the kingdom. Everybody knows
this is not the old family name, which was O'Shaughlin, related
to the kings of Ireland--but that was before my time. My
grandfather was driver to the great Sir Patrick O'Shaughlin, and
I heard him, when I was a boy, telling how the Castle Rackrent
estate came to Sir Patrick; Sir Tallyhoo Rackrent was cousin-
german to him, and had a fine estate of his own, only never a
gate upon it, it being his maxim that a car was the best gate.
Poor gentleman! he lost a fine hunter and his life, at last, by
it, all in one day's hunt. But I ought to bless that day, for
the estate came straight into THE family, upon one condition,
which Sir Patrick O'Shaughlin at the time took sadly to heart,
they say, but thought better of it afterwards, seeing how large a
stake depended upon it: that he should, by Act of Parliament,
take and bear the surname and arms of Rackrent.

Now it was that the world was to see what was IN Sir Patrick. On
coming into the estate he gave the finest entertainment ever was
heard of in the country; not a man could stand after supper but
Sir Patrick himself who could sit out the best man in Ireland,
let alone the three kingdoms itself [See GLOSSARY 2]. He had his
house, from one year's end to another, as full of company as ever
it could hold, and fuller; for rather than be left out of the
parties at Castle Rackrent, many gentlemen, and those men of the
first consequence and landed estates in the country--such as the
O'Neills of Ballynagrotty, and the Moneygawls of Mount Juliet's
Town, and O'Shannons of New Town Tullyhog--made it their choice,
often and often, when there was no room to be had for love nor
money, in long winter nights, to sleep in the chicken-house,
which Sir Patrick had fitted up for the purpose of accommodating
his friends and the public in general, who honoured him with
their company unexpectedly at Castle Rackrent; and this went on I
can't tell you how long. The whole country rang with his
praises!--long life to him! I'm sure I love to look upon his
picture, now opposite to me; though I never saw him, he must have
been a portly gentleman--his neck something short, and remarkable
for the largest pimple on his nose, which, by his particular
desire, is still extant in his picture, said to be a striking
likeness, though taken when young. He is said also to be the
inventor of raspberry whisky, which is very likely, as nobody has
ever appeared to dispute it with him, and as there still exists a
broken punch-bowl at Castle Rackrent, in the garret, with an
inscription to that effect--a great curiosity. A few days before
his death he was very merry; it being his honour's birthday, he
called my grandfather in--God bless him!--to drink the company's
health, and filled a bumper himself, but could not carry it to
his head, on account of the great shake in his hand; on this he
cast his joke, saying, 'What would my poor father say to me if he
was to pop out of the grave, and see me now? I remember when I
was a little boy, the first bumper of claret he gave me after
dinner, how he praised me for carrying it so steady to my mouth.
Here's my thanks to him--a bumper toast.' Then he fell to singing
the favourite song he learned from his father--for the last time,
poor gentleman--he sung it that night as loud and as hearty as
ever, with a chorus:

He that goes to bed, and goes to bed sober,
Falls as the leaves do, falls as the leaves do, and dies in
    October;
'But he that goes to bed, and goes to bed mellow,
Lives as he ought to do, lives as he ought to do, and dies an
    honest fellow.

Sir Patrick died that night: just as the company rose to drink
his health with three cheers, he fell down in a sort of fit, and
was carried off; they sat it out, and were surprised, on inquiry
in the morning, to find that it was all over with poor Sir
Patrick. Never did any gentleman live and die more beloved in
the country by rich and poor. His funeral was such a one as was
never known before or since in the county! All the gentlemen in
the three counties were at it; far and near, how they flocked!
my great-grandfather said, that to see all the women, even in
their red cloaks, you would have taken them for the army drawn
out. Then such a fine whillaluh! [See GLOSSARY 3]  you might
have heard it to the farthest end of the county, and happy the
man who could get but a sight of the hearse! But who'd have
thought it? Just as all was going on right, through his own town
they were passing, when the body was seized for debt--a rescue
was apprehended from the mob; but the heir, who attended the
funeral, was against that, for fear of consequences, seeing that
those villains who came to serve acted under the disguise of the
law: so, to be sure, the law must take its course, and little
gain had the creditors for their pains. First and foremost, they
had the curses of the country: and Sir Murtagh Rackrent, the new
heir, in the next place, on account of this affront to the body,
refused to pay a shilling of the debts, in which he was
countenanced by all the best gentlemen of property, and others of
his acquaintance; Sir Murtagh alleging in all companies that he
all along meant to pay his father's debts of honour, but the
moment the law was taken of him, there was an end of honour to be
sure. It was whispered (but none but the enemies of the family
believe it) that this was all a sham seizure to get quit of the
debts which he had bound himself to pay in honour.

It's a long time ago, there's no saying how it was, but this for
certain, the new man did not take at all after the old gentleman;
the cellars were never filled after his death, and no open house,
or anything as it used to be; the tenants even were sent away
without their whisky [See GLOSSARY 4]. I was ashamed myself, and
knew not what to say for the honour of the family; but I made the
best of a bad case, and laid it all at my lady's door, for I did
not like her anyhow, nor anybody else; she was of the family of
the Skinflints, and a widow; it was a strange match for Sir
Murtagh; the people in the country thought he demeaned himself
greatly [See GLOSSARY 5], but I said nothing; I knew how it was.
Sir Murtagh was a great lawyer, and looked to the great Skinflint
estate; there, however, he overshot himself; for though one of
the co-heiresses, he was never the better for her, for she
outlived him many's the long day--he could not see that to be
sure when he married her. I must say for her, she made him the
best of wives, being a very notable, stirring woman, and looking
close to everything. But I always suspected she had Scotch blood
in her veins; anything else I could have looked over in her, from
a regard to the family. She was a strict observer, for self and
servants, of Lent, and all fast-days, but not holidays. One of
the maids having fainted three times the last day of Lent, to
keep soul and body together, we put a morsel of roast beef into
her mouth, which came from Sir Murtagh's dinner, who never
fasted, not he; but somehow or other it unfortunately reached my
lady's ears, and the priest of the parish had a complaint made of
it the next day, and the poor girl was forced, as soon as she
could walk, to do penance for it, before she could get any peace
or absolution, in the house or out of it. However, my lady was
very charitable in her own way. She had a charity school for
poor children, where they were taught to read and write gratis,
and where they were kept well to spinning gratis for my lady in
return; for she had always heaps of duty yarn from the tenants,
and got all her household linen out of the estate from first to
last; for after the spinning, the weavers on the estate took it
in hand for nothing, because of the looms my lady's interest
could get from the Linen Board to distribute gratis. Then there
was a bleach-yard near us, and the tenant dare refuse my lady
nothing, for fear of a lawsuit Sir Murtagh kept hanging over him
about the watercourse. With these ways of managing, 'tis
surprising how cheap my lady got things done, and how proud she
was of it. Her table the same way, kept for next to nothing
[See GLOSSARY 6]; duty fowls, and duty turkeys, and duty geese,
came as fast as we could eat 'em, for my lady kept a sharp look-
out, and knew to a tub of butter everything the tenants had, all
round. They knew her way, and what with fear of driving for rent
and Sir Murtagh's lawsuits, they were kept in such good order,
they never thought of coming near Castle Rackrent without a
present of something or other--nothing too much or too little for
my lady--eggs, honey, butter, meal, fish, game, grouse, and
herrings, fresh or salt, all went for something. As for their
young pigs, we had them, and the best bacon and hams they could
make up, with all young chickens in spring; but they were a set
of poor wretches, and we had nothing but misfortunes with them,
always breaking and running away. This, Sir Murtagh and my lady
said, was all their former landlord Sir Patrick's fault, who let
'em all get the half-year's rent into arrear; there was something
in that to be sure. But Sir Murtagh was as much the contrary
way; for let alone making English tenants [See GLOSSARY 7] of
them, every soul, he was always driving and driving, and pounding
and pounding, and canting and canting [See GLOSSARY 8], and
replevying and replevying, and he made a good living of
trespassing cattle; there was always some tenant's pig, or horse,
or cow, or calf, or goose, trespassing, which was so great a gain
to Sir Murtagh, that he did not like to hear me talk of repairing
fences. Then his heriots and duty-work [See GLOSSARY 9] brought
him in something, his turf was cut, his potatoes set and dug, his
hay brought home, and, in short, all the work about his house
done for nothing; for in all our leases there were strict clauses
heavy with penalties, which Sir Murtagh knew well how to enforce;
so many days' duty-work of man and horse, from every tenant, he
was to have, and had, every year; and when a man vexed him, why,
the finest day he could pitch on, when the cratur was getting in
his own harvest, or thatching his cabin, Sir Murtagh made it a
principle to call upon him and his horse; so he taught 'em all,
as he said, to know the law of landlord and tenant. As for law, I
believe no man, dead or alive, ever loved it so well as Sir
Murtagh. He had once sixteen suits pending at a time, and I
never saw him so much himself: roads, lanes, bogs, wells, ponds,
eel-wires, orchards, trees, tithes, vagrants, gravelpits,
sandpits, dunghills, and nuisances, everything upon the face of
the earth furnished him good matter for a suit. He used to boast
that he had a lawsuit for every letter in the alphabet. How I
used to wonder to see Sir Murtagh in the midst of the papers in
his office! Why, he could hardly turn about for them. I made
bold to shrug my shoulders once in his presence, and thanked my
stars I was not born a gentleman to so much toil and trouble; but
Sir Murtagh took me up short with his old proverb, 'learning is
better than house or land.'  Out of forty-nine suits which he
had, he never lost one but seventeen [See GLOSSARY 10]; the rest
he gained with costs, double costs, treble costs sometimes; but
even that did not pay. He was a very learned man in the law, and
had the character of it; but how it was I can't tell, these suits
that he carried cost him a power of money: in the end he sold
some hundreds a year of the family estate; but he was a very
learned man in the law, and I know nothing of the matter, except
having a great regard for the family; and I could not help
grieving when he sent me to post up notices of the sale of the
fee simple of the lands and appurtenances of Timoleague.

'I know, honest Thady,' says he, to comfort me, 'what I'm about
better than you do; I'm only selling to get the ready money
wanting to carry on my suit with spirit with the Nugents of
Carrickashaughlin.'

He was very sanguine about that suit with the Nugents of
Carrickashaughlin. He could have gained it, they say, for
certain, had it pleased Heaven to have spared him to us, and it
would have been at the least a plump two thousand a year in his
way; but things were ordered otherwise--for the best to be sure.
He dug up a fairy-mount against my advice, and had no luck
afterwards. [These fairy-mounts are called ant-hills in England.
They are held in high reverence by the common people in Ireland.
A gentleman, who in laying out his lawn had occasion to level one
of these hillocks, could not prevail upon any of his labourers to
begin the ominous work. He was obliged to take a LOY from one of
their reluctant hands, and began the attack himself. The
labourers agreed that the vengeance of the fairies would fall
upon the head of the presumptuous mortal who first disturbed them
in their retreat [See GLOSSARY 11].]  Though a learned man in the
law, he was a little too incredulous in other matters. I warned
him that I heard the very Banshee that my grandfather heard under
Sir Patrick's window a few days before his death. [The Banshee
is a species of aristocratic fairy, who, in the shape of a little
hideous old woman, has been known to appear, and heard to sing in
a mournful supernatural voice under the windows of great houses,
to warn the family that some of them are soon to die. In the
last century every great family in Ireland had a Banshee, who
attended regularly; but latterly their visits and songs have been
discontinued.]  But Sir Murtagh thought nothing of the Banshee,
nor of his cough, with a spitting of blood, brought on, I
understand, by catching cold in attending the courts, and
overstraining his chest with making himself heard in one of his
favourite causes. He was a great speaker with a powerful voice;
but his last speech was not in the courts at all. He and my
lady, though both of the same way of thinking in some things, and
though she was as good a wife and great economist as you could
see, and he the best of husbands, as to looking into his affairs,
and making money for his family; yet I don't know how it was,
they had a great deal of sparring and jarring between them. My
lady had her privy purse; and she had her weed ashes [See
GLOSSARY 12], and her sealing money [See GLOSSARY 13] upon the
signing of all the leases, with something to buy gloves besides;
and, besides, again often took money from the tenants, if offered
properly, to speak for them to Sir Murtagh about abatements and
renewals. Now the weed ashes and the glove money he allowed her
clear perquisites; though once when he saw her in a new gown
saved out of the weed ashes, he told her to my face (for he could
say a sharp thing) that she should not put on her weeds before
her husband's death. But in a dispute about an abatement my lady
would have the last word, and Sir Murtagh grew mad [See GLOSSARY
14]; I was within hearing of the door, and now I wish I had made
bold to step in. He spoke so loud, the whole kitchen was out on
the stairs [See GLOSSARY 15]. All on a sudden he stopped, and my
lady too. Something has surely happened, thought I; and so it
was, for Sir Murtagh in his passion broke a blood-vessel, and all
the law in the land could do nothing in that case. My lady sent
for five physicians, but Sir Murtagh died, and was buried. She
had a fine jointure settled upon her, and took herself away, to
the great joy of the tenantry. I never said anything one way or
the other whilst she was part of the family, but got up to see
her go at three o'clock in the morning.

'It's a fine morning, honest Thady,' says she; 'good-bye to ye.'
And into the carriage she stepped, without a word more, good or
bad, or even half-a-crown; but I made my bow, and stood to see
her safe out of sight for the sake of the family.

Then we were all bustle in the house, which made me keep out of
the way, for I walk slow and hate a bustle; but the house was all
hurry-skurry, preparing for my new master. Sir Murtagh, I forgot
to notice, had no childer [CHILDER: this is the manner in
which many of Thady's rank, and others in Ireland, formerly
pronounced the word CHILDREN]; so the Rackrent estate went to his
younger brother, a young dashing officer, who came amongst us
before I knew for the life of me whereabouts I was, in a gig or
some of them things, with another spark along with him, and led
horses, and servants, and dogs, and scarce a place to put any
Christian of them into; for my late lady had sent all the
feather-beds off before her, and blankets and household linen,
down to the very knife-cloths, on the cars to Dublin, which were
all her own, lawfully paid for out of her own money. So the
house was quite bare, and my young master, the moment ever he set
foot in it out of his gig, thought all those things must come of
themselves, I believe, for he never looked after anything at all,
but harum-scarum called for everything as if we were conjurors,
or he in a public-house. For my part, I could not bestir myself
anyhow; I had been so much used to my late master and mistress,
all was upside down with me, and the new servants in the
servants' hall were quite out of my way; I had nobody to talk to,
and if it had not been for my pipe and tobacco, should, I verily
believe, have broke my heart for poor Sir Murtagh.

But one morning my new master caught a glimpse of me as I was
looking at his horse's heels, in hopes of a word from him. 'And
is that old Thady?'  says he, as he got into his gig: I loved
him from that day to this, his voice was so like the family; and
he threw me a guinea out of his waistcoat-pocket, as he drew up
the reins with the other hand, his horse rearing too; I thought I
never set my eyes on a finer figure of a man, quite another sort
from Sir Murtagh, though withal, TO ME, a family likeness. A
fine life we should have led, had he stayed amongst us, God bless
him! He valued a guinea as little as any man: money to him was
no more than dirt, and his gentleman and groom, and all belonging
to him, the same; but the sporting season over, he grew tired of
the place, and having got down a great architect for the house,
and an improver for the grounds, and seen their plans and
elevations, he fixed a day for settling with the tenants, but
went off in a whirlwind to town, just as some of them came into
the yard in the morning. A circular letter came next post from
the new agent, with news that the master was sailed for England,
and he must remit L500 to Bath for his use before a fortnight was
at an end; bad news still for the poor tenants, no change still
for the better with them. Sir Kit Rackrent, my young master,
left all to the agent; and though he had the spirit of a prince,
and lived away to the honour of his country abroad, which I was
proud to hear of, what were we the better for that at home? The
agent was one of your middlemen, who grind the face of the poor,
and can never bear a man with a hat upon his head: he ferreted
the tenants out of their lives; not a week without a call for
money, drafts upon drafts from Sir Kit; but I laid it all to the
fault of the agent; for, says I, what can Sir Kit do with so much
cash, and he a single man?

[MIDDLEMEN.--There was a class of men, termed middlemen, in
Ireland, who took large farms on long leases from gentlemen of
landed property, and let the land again in small portions to the
poor, as under-tenants, at exorbitant rents. The HEAD LANDLORD,
as he was called, seldom saw his UNDER-TENANTS; but if he could
not get the MIDDLEMAN to pay him his rent punctually, he WENT TO
HIS LAND, AND DROVE THE LAND FOR HIS RENT; that is to say, he
sent his steward, or bailiff, or driver, to the land to seize the
cattle, hay, corn, flax, oats, or potatoes, belonging to the
under-tenants, and proceeded to sell these for his rents. It
sometimes happened that these unfortunate tenants paid their rent
twice over, once to the MIDDLEMAN, and once to the HEAD LANDLORD.

The characteristics of a middleman were servility to his
superiors and tyranny towards his inferiors: the poor detested
this race of beings. In speaking to them, however, they always
used the most abject language, and the most humble tone and
posture--'PLEASE YOUR HONOUR; AND PLEASE YOUR HONOUR'S HONOUR,'
they knew must be repeated as a charm at the beginning and end of
every equivocating, exculpatory, or supplicatory sentence; and
they were much more alert in doffing their caps to those new men
than to those of what they call GOOD OLD FAMILIES. A witty
carpenter once termed these middlemen JOURNEYMEN GENTLEMEN.]

But still it went. Rents must be all paid up to the day, and
afore; no allowance for improving tenants, no consideration for
those who had built upon their farms: no sooner was a lease out,
but the land was advertised to the highest bidder; all the old
tenants turned out, when they spent their substance in the hope
and trust of a renewal from the landlord. All was now let at the
highest penny to a parcel of poor wretches, who meant to run
away, and did so, after taking two crops out of the ground. Then
fining down the year's rent came into fashion [See GLOSSARY 16]
--anything for the ready penny; and with all this and presents to
the agent and the driver [See GLOSSARY 17], there was no such
thing as standing it. I said nothing, for I had a regard for the
family; but I walked about thinking if his honour Sir Kit knew
all this, it would go hard with him but he'd see us righted; not
that I had anything for my own share to complain of, for the
agent was always very civil to me when he came down into the
country, and took a great deal of notice of my son Jason. Jason
Quirk, though he be my son, I must say was a good scholar from
his birth, and a very 'cute lad: I thought to make him a priest
[See GLOSSARY 18], but he did better for himself; seeing how he
was as good a clerk as any in the county, the agent gave him his
rent accounts to copy, which he did first of all for the pleasure
of obliging the gentleman, and would take nothing at all for his
trouble, but was always proud to serve the family. By and by a
good farm bounding us to the east fell into his honour's hands,
and my son put in a proposal for it: why shouldn't he, as well
as another? The proposals all went over to the master at the
Bath, who knowing no more of the land than the child unborn, only
having once been out a-grousing on it before he went to England;
and the value of lands, as the agent informed him, falling every
year in Ireland, his honour wrote over in all haste a bit of a
letter, saying he left it all to the agent, and that he must let
it as well as he could--to the best bidder, to be sure--and send
him over L200 by return of post: with this the agent gave me a
hint, and I spoke a good word for my son, and gave out in the
country that nobody need bid against us. So his proposal was
just the thing, and he a good tenant; and he got a promise of an
abatement in the rent after the first year, for advancing the
half-year's rent at signing the lease, which was wanting to
complete the agent's L200 by the return of the post, with all
which my master wrote back he was well satisfied. About this
time we learnt from the agent, as a great secret, how the money
went so fast, and the reason of the thick coming of the master's
drafts: he was a little too fond of play; and Bath, they say,
was no place for no young man of his fortune, where there were so
many of his own countrymen, too, hunting him up and down, day and
night, who had nothing to lose. At last, at Christmas, the agent
wrote over to stop the drafts, for he could raise no more money
on bond or mortgage, or from the tenants, or anyhow, nor had he
any more to lend himself, and desired at the same time to decline
the agency for the future, wishing Sir Kit his health and
happiness, and the compliments of the season, for I saw the
letter before ever it was sealed, when my son copied it. When
the answer came there was a new turn in affairs, and the agent
was turned out; and my son Jason, who had corresponded privately
with his honour occasionally on business, was forthwith desired
by his honour to take the accounts into his own hands, and look
them over, ti