but one. tell you all about it herself to-morrow; her first partner was Mr. Elton; I do not know who will ask her next, perhaps Mr. William Cox.' My dear sir, you are too obliging. Is there nobody you would not rather?-I am not helpless. Sir, you are most kind. Upon my word, Jane on one arm, and me on the other! Stop, stop, let us stand a little back, Mrs. Elton is going; dear Mrs. Elton, how elegant she looks!-beautiful lace !-now we all follow in her train. Quite the queen of the evening!-Well, here we are at the passage. Two steps, Jane, take care of the two steps. Oh! no, there is but one. Well, I was persuaded there were two. How very odd! I was convinced there were two, and there is I never saw anything equal to the comfort and style-candles everywhere. I was telling you of your grandmamma, Jane- there was a little disappointment. The baked apples and biscuits. Excellent in their way, you know; but there was a delicate fricassee of sweetbread and some asparagus brought in at first, and good Mr. Woodhouse, not thinking the asparagus quite boiled enough, sent it all out again. Now, there is nothing grandmamma loves better than sweetbread and asparagus, so she was rather disappointed; but we agreed we would not speak of it to anybody, for fear of its getting round to dear Miss Woodhouse, who would be so very much concerned! Well, this is brilliant! I am all amazement !-Could not have supposed anything!-such elegance and profusion! I have seen nothing like it since-Well, where shall we sit? Where shall we sit? Anywhere, so that Jane is not in a draught. Where I sit is of no consequence. Oh! do you recommend this side? Well, I am sure, Mr. Churchill-only it seems too good--but just as you please. What you direct in this house cannot be wrong. Dear Jane, how shall we ever recollect half the dishes for grandmamma? Soup, too! Bless me! I should not be helped so soon, but it smells most excellent, and I cannot help beginning." Miss Austen is one of those writers who suffer when we attempt to represent their talent through the medium of detached passages. She neither strains after the hysterics of emotion, nor high-sounding descriptions. Her works must be judged of in the whole, and then it will be seen how natural, and therefore how powerful, are her delineations of character. She individualises without effort, and her various personages grow upon us silently, and yet with penetrating force. It has been said that our author never descends to the vulgar -a just remark-though there is a soupçon of vulgarity about the character of Thorpe, in "Northanger Abbey." Her drawing of real English gentlemen is most successful-and she has given us a whole gallery of characters whom we may find typified in Bertram and Knightley. As she does not depend upon plot or striking situations for effect, we are unable to extract from her novels passages illustrative of her best qualities, as is the case with most other writers. This sketch of John Thorpe, however-with his touch of braggadocio and snobbery, yet jovial and good-humoured withal-is graphically done, and seems to bring the very man himself before us : John Thorpe, who, in the meantime, had been giving orders about the horses, soon joined the ladies, and from him she (Catherine) directly received the amends which were her due; for while he slightly and carelessly touched the hand of Isabella, on her he bestowed a whole scrape and half a short bow. He was a stout young man, of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome, unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be easy. He took out his watch: "How long do you think we have been running it from Tetbury, Miss Morland?" 66 miles. 66 I do not know the distance." Her brother told her that it was twenty-three Three-and-twenty," cried Thorpe ; "five-and-twenty if it is an inch." Morland remonstrated, pleaded the authority of road books, innkeepers, and milestones; but his friend disregarded them all; he had a surer test of distance. "I know it must be five-and-twenty," said he, "by the time we have been doing it. It is now half after one; we drove out of the inn yard at Tetbury as the town clock struck eleven; and I defy any man in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour in harness; that makes it exactly twentyfive." "You have lost an hour," said Morland; "it was only ten o'clock when we came from Tetbury." "Ten o'clock ! It was eleven, upon my soul! I counted every stroke. This brother of yours would persuade me out of my senses, Miss Morland; do but look at my horse; did you ever see an animal so made for speed in your life?" (The servant had just mounted the carriage, and was driving off.) "Such true blood! Three hours and a half, indeed, coming only three-and-twenty miles! look at that creature, and suppose it possible, if you can." "He does look very hot, to be sure." came to Walcot Church: but look at his forehand; look at his loins; only see how he moves; that horse cannot go less than ten miles an hour; tie his legs, and he will get on. What do you think of my gig, Miss Morland? a neat one, is it not? Well hung; town built ; I have not had it a month. It was built for a Christchurch man, a friend of mine, a very good sort of fellow; he ran it a few weeks till, I believe, it was convenient to have done with it. I happened just then to be looking out for some light thing of the kind, though I had pretty well determined on a curricle too; but I chanced to meet him on Magdalen Bridge, as he was driving into Oxford last term: Ah! Thorpe,' said he, do you happen to want such a little thing as this? It is a capital one of the kind, but I am cursed tired of it.' 'Oh ! d-it,' said I, ' I am your man; what do you ask?' And how much do you think he did, Miss Morland?" "I am sure I cannot guess, at all." "Curricle-hung, you see; seat, trunk, sword-case, splashing-board, lamps, silver moulding-all, you see, complete; the ironwork as good as new, or better. He asked fifty guineas: I closed with him directly, threw down the money, and the carriage was mine." "And I am sure," said Catherine, "I know so little of such things, that I cannot judge whether it was cheap or dear." "Neither one nor t'other; I might have got it for less, I dare say; but I hate haggling, and poor Freeman wanted cash.” "That was very good-natured of you," said Catherine, quite pleased. "Oh! d- it, when one has the means of doing a kind thing by a friend, I hate to be pitiful.” An admirable sentiment, if somewhat emphatically expressed. But this extract well shows the whole style and character of the man. How comes it that of all the old novels, so few have survived to our own day? Where twenty have perished, only one lives to be read and remembered. We have Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Goldsmith, and Jane Austen; but the works of other novelists, for which immortality was predicted at the beginning of the century, have sunk beyond revival in the waters of oblivion. There must be some secret power, some salt of the intellect, which preserves alive those works which have reached us, and which seem as fresh and entertaining to us as they appeared to the contemporaries of their various authors. Macaulay indicated some of the reasons for the popularity of Miss Austen in defining the chief qualities of her novels; and at the risk of repeating a passage already familiar to the reader, we will cite this eminent writer's criticism :-"Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second. But among the writers who have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace-all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom: Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class. They have all been liberally educated. They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession; they are all young; they are all in love. Not one of them has any hobby-horse, to use the phrase of Sterne; not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to Sir Lucius O'Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen's young divines to all his reverend brethren. And almost all this is done by touches so delicate, that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed." In the last sentence, Macaulay has happily described the general impression left upon the mind by the writings of Miss Austen. Her quiet and unobtrusive power produced a similar effect upon Sir Walter Scott. In his diary these words appear, dated March 14, 1826: "Read again, for the third time at least, Miss Austen's finely-written novel of 'Pride and Prejudice.' That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me." It is certainly not a little remarkable that an author whose "books contain nothing more exciting than a village ball or the gossip of a village spinster's tea-table; nothing more tragic than the overturning of a chaise in a soft ditch, or a party being caught in a shower of rain going to church," should thus have extracted eulogies from the finest spirits of the age. A recent critic has quarrelled with her on the ground that her clergymen are not such clergymen as would satisfy us if they were thus drawn in stories written at the present time. This may be so; she has drawn the clergy of her own day; and they were not in the habit of obtruding the cloth, neither did they claim to be aesthetic as the word is now understood. Many of the clergymen Miss Austen has drawn are fine manly fellows; but in mingling in society they do not make everybody else uncomfortable by continually insisting upon the nature of their profession. Yet it must be admitted that some of them fail in rising to a true conception of the sacred and dignified nature of the office of a parish priest. Since Miss Austen's time, conscience has been quickened in the Church. There is now an earnestness abroad to which the clergy were formerly comparative strangers. In commenting upon the character of Miss Austen's novels, another writer, who until quite recently was in our midst, deposed that he found little humour in them. This is an extraordinary and almost incredible mistake. There is very considerable humour in the novels, but it is a humour very difficult to define. It does not consist in the observations of the author so much, but radiates from the characters themselves-a result due to their truthful delineation. Miss Austen has invented many persons who cannot be said to talk wittily, or who give expression to isolated jeux d'esprit, and yet every one recognises them and classifies them as distinctly humorous characters. As a penetrating critic has well said: "Like Shakespeare, she shows as admirable a discrimination in the character of fools as of people of sense; a merit which is far from common. Το invent indeed a conversation full of wisdom or of wit, requires that the writer should himself possess ability; but the converse does not hold good, it is no fool that can describe fools well; and many who have succeeded pretty well in painting superior characters, have failed in giving individuality to those weaker ones which it is necessary to introduce in order to give a faithful representation of real life. They exhibit to us mere folly in the abstract, forgetting that to the eye of the skilful naturalist the insects on a leaf present as wide differences as exist between the lion and the elephant. Slender, and Shallow, and Aguecheek, as Shakespeare has painted them, though equally fools, resemble one another no more than Richard, and Macbeth, and Julius Cæsar; and Miss Austen's Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Rushworth, and Miss Bates are no more alike than her Darcy, Knightley, and Edmund Bertram." The faculty of humour was, in fact, very strongly developed in Jane Austen, but she was fastidious in the use of it. Her minuteness of detail has been objected to; but while on the part of a tyro this would undoubtedly become wearisome, the same cannot be said with regard to the author of "Pride and Prejudice." Dutch painting may be high art, notwithstanding its minutiæ; and faithfully to depict the trivial may require a genius equal to that which shall adequately describe the magnificent and the sublime. The principal reasons, therefore, for Miss Austen's hold upon the reading public-a hold which we may reasonably believe will be constant and enduring--are not far to seek. Adopting a totally different course from Mrs. Radcliffe and her school, she substituted reality for excitement. The change was agreeable and refreshing. It has been observed that, although novels are supposed to give a false picture of life and manners, this is not necessarily so. As regards many novelists, unquestionably the accusation is true, but no one can really feel its applicability to the works of Jane Austen. Her characters are not unnatural, neither are her incidents in the least degree improbable. She too thoroughly understands human nature to exaggerate its sentiments beyond recognition. Miss Austen is also a moral writer in the highest sense-that is, there is a high tone pervading all her works; this is no more than the natural outcome of her own life and character. But she has also great literary claims. Besides her capacity for minute detail as affecting her dramatis personæ, already insisted upon, she has vivid powers of description, all the more effective, perhaps, because they are held in check by a sound judgment and a well-balanced imagination. She never exhausts a scene by what is called word-painting. She indicates its main features, and describes the general effect it produces upon the spectator, rather than recapitulates the size, weight, and |