Maria Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish novelist whose Castle Rackrent is usually credited as a founding regional novel, and who was, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, one of the most widely read novelists in Britain and Ireland. Her gift was compression: she turned other people’s long moral arguments into single sentences a fourteen-year-old would remember. That is exactly what happened here — she read a paragraph of Johnson’s and gave the world an aphorism, while footnoting him and adding “as somebody says”, so the credit slid away from her almost immediately.