MISS EDGEWORTH’S essay on “Irish Bulls” is really a collection of essays and sketches, the joint work of Miss Edgeworth and her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. In writing his biography, she says that though she does not clearly remember which parts are entirely her own, those which contain classical allusions must be his, as she was “entirely ignorant of the learned languages.” This seems to transfer to her father the celebrated sketch of the quarrel between Dublin shoeblacks, which Saintsbury attributes to her. It is well enough she should be relieved of it, for there is something unfeminine and uncharacteristic of her in the classical jesting on the use of the shoe knife in a street quarrel. Taking the essay on “Irish Bulls” as a whole, it had a narrow escape from the greatness as an essay, which Miss Edgeworth achieved as a novelist. She was born in Oxfordshire, England, in 1768, but she belongs of right to Ireland, where she went when only twelve years old. “The Absentee,” one of the many powerful novels in which she rallied the forces of fiction to the aid of good morals, is a plea for justice for the Irish peasantry against nonresident landlords. She died in 1849, after having written eighteen volumes of the best fiction of modern times. Nearly always she is a good artist as well as a good woman and a good preacher; and if sometimes she stops the story too long in the interest of the sermon, it ought to be forgiven her for the sake of her entire unlikeness to the Sapphos of “end-of-the-century” fiction.