and degree, and throughout every station in society. "It is twice accursed," says our author, "once in giving, once in receiving." "In as far as the public good is concerned, fair competition is more advantageous to the arts and artists, than any private patronage can be. If the productions have real merit, they will make their own way. If they have not, they ought not to make their way. And the same argument she applies to literary merit; and to the merit, generally speaking, of persons as well as things. She also considers the trade of a patron as one of the most thankless, as it is the least useful, of all trades. This, it must be confessed, is bold and magnanimous doctrine, and strikes at once at so many interests and vanities, as to require all Miss Edgeworth's influence and authority to save it from general reprobation. What a host of prejudices must be overthrown upon this plan! What a swarm of littlenesses devested of their paltry disguises!-ministers-Mecænas's-mistresses-patrons at court-in the churchand in the drawing-room-all cashiered and depreciated! and the shade of their protection denounced as fatal to the forced and feeble plants which are destined to seek there, either for support or for shelter. Then the whole tribe of expectant courtiers, impatient authors, querulous artists, and trading politicians, are in danger of being roused from the pleasing dreams of patronage, and are invited to depend for success upon the fair competition of those emancipated talents by which alone they can deserve it!

The story places Mr. and Mr. Percy, with their eldest son Godfrey, and their daughters Caroline and Rosamond, at the family mansion on the coast of Hampshire. A shipwreck happens, which introduces a crew of Dutchmen, with a M. de Tourville, a diplomatic agent at a German court, to the generous hospitality of the Percys. After a day or two the Frenchman leaves them, in great distress at having lostap a cket of importance, in the general confusion. The Dutch crew, having repaired the vessel, set sail, but not until the carelesness of their carpenter had set fire to the old mansion. The library is destroyed; and this loss is the more severe, because, in examining the papers that had escaped, Mr. Percy misses a deed upon which the tenure of Percy Hall depends. Rosamond exultingly brings to her father a copy, which she mistakes for the original, but, unluckily, in the presence of an attorney, whom Mr. Percy's love of strict justice had made his enemy, and who immediately discovers that it wants the seal and signature. In the mean time, Commissioner Falconer, a relation of Mr. Percy, is introduced, and announces the arrival of Lord Oldborough in the neighbourhood-a great man-a cabinet minister-and, moreover, an old friend of Mr. Percy's, from whom the commissioner covets an introduction to the peer, for a reason which he conceals from his friend, viz. that he had found the diplomatist's lost packet, and means to make the most of that good