Miss Edgeworth’s books fitted into her busy life as a natural occupation for long evenings. She wrote in the common sitting-room with the family about her, not one of them under any constraint, but talking freely, as if she had been sewing instead of novel-writing. It was characteristic of her that she could turn to children’s books in the midst of the Defender troubles. An Irish rising claimed no more attention than the play and laughter of the children. She could refer to it in a letter, and pass on to the next domestic detail without wasting a moment in “useless reflection”. That is precisely the mood of her stories. The _Moral Tales_, addressed to an emotional age, do not merely ignore the common forms of “Sensibility”; they take no account whatever of the stronger affections and more vigorous manifestations of life: a thing scarcely tolerable to generous youth. In the nursery books, this equanimity has its uses. It enables her to deal with one thing at a time, to select from a mass of details the particular things that a child would waste time in choosing. Nothing worries or puzzles her; she sees the world in clear and simple pictures, and reduces the inconsequent thoughts of children to a relentless order.