a contracted sphere, with limited opportunities of observation, among common-place people, who knew little variety even in their amusements. The very narrowness of her range enabled her to concentrate her intellectual vision upon the few types of character which she did meet, with an intensity for which no more extensive experience could have compensated, had it lessened this peculiar power. These are the differential qualities of Miss Austen's novels-a series of characters which, for the knowledge of human nature and the delicacy of finish displayed in them, have been compared perhaps rashly to Shakspeare's, unfolded through a series of events which are almost as uninteresting as the Citizen's Journal in the Spectator. This is a wonderful triumph of art. Yet it is equally clear that excellence of this kind is no passport to extensive popularity. On the whole, Jane Austen has probably been as much admired as in the nature of things it was possible she should be. Lord Macaulay and Archbishop Whately have done for her reputation all that the most influential criticism can accomplish. And all we can expect is, that the recent biography will stimulate attention to her writings among those who admire them already, without communicating it to the general mass of novel readers.

Miss Austen was the daughter of a country clergyman, who was rector of Steventon in Hampshire from 1764 to 1801. Her mother was a Miss Leigh, likewise the daughter of a clergyman, and a connection of the Leighs of Stoneleigh. On the father's side, too, the family is said to have been gentle, though in the beginning of the seventeenth century its representatives were Kentish clothiers. At all events, it had good and opulent connections, and through these Mr. Austen obtained his preferment. His daughter Jane was born at Steventon on the 16th of December, 1775; and here she lived till the year 1800, when Mr. Austen, finding himself too infirm for duty, resigned his living to his son. The family retired to Bath, but only for a short time. After her father's death, they lived a little while at Southampton, but finally settled down again in the country at Chancton, a Hampshire village about a mile from the town of Alton. "While Jane was at Bath and Southampton," says her biographer, "she was a sojourner in a strange land;" here "she found a real home among her own people." But it is evident that, during her stay at Bath, she was watching the life of the place with a curious and observing eye, which enabled her afterwards to reproduce it with so much effect in "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey." Still her main sources of inspiration lay round Steventon and Chancton, among the beneficed clergy and the county families, which constituted the society of the neighbourhood. At Steventon her. aunt's family lived quite in the style of the clerical squire. The living was a family living. The patron owned the whole parish; and as he never resided there, his place in the eyes of the

village was filled by the rector. Mrs. Austen had her carriage and pair. The sons shot over the manor. Dinner-parties were exchanged with the best society in the neighbourhood. And though, as Mr. Leigh points out, carriages did not then imply so high a scale of honour as they do now, still it is clear that, on the whole, the Austens were in a thoroughly good county position; and that the Bertrams, the Tilneys, and the Dashwoods, with which she was to charm the world, were the result of her personal experience. That sombre and opulent and respectable society, rich and dark like a twelfth cake, is no longer exactly what it was. But it still exists in a tolerable state of preservation, sufficient to enable any reader who was mixed in it to reproduce for himself, without any great stretch of the imaginative faculty, the drawing-room at Mansfield Park.

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It was during her residence at Chancton, that is, between the years 1809 and 1817, that all her novels were published. But she had written three of them-namely, "Pride and Prejudice," Northanger Abbey," and "Sense and Sensibility," before leaving Steventon—that is, before she was five-and-twenty. The first of these, offered to a London publisher, was declined by return of post. The second was sold to a bookseller at Bath for ten pounds, who, like poor Goldsmith with the "Vicar of Wakefield," kept it by him some years without venturing to publish it, and ultimately, on receipt of his purchase-money, returned it to the lady's brother, who had the pleasure of informing him that the rejected work was by the authoress of "Pride and Prejudice." The chronological order of her works was as follows: "Sense and Sensibility," published in 1811, "Pride and Prejudice" in 1813, "Mansfield Park" in 1814, and "Emma" in 1816. "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey," but lately recovered from the undiscerning bibliopole, appeared after her death. This event took place in 1817, at Winchester, where she had gone for medical advice; but her nephew does not tell us to what kind of disease we are to attribute her premature decay. She had not yet completed her forty-second year when the grave closed over her; a singular exception to her three celebrated contemporaries, Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Mitford, who all attained extreme longevity.

In person Miss Austen must have been at least pretty; she was brown-haired, blue-eyed, and slightly above the average height. She may be said with literal truth to have passed through life "in maiden meditation, fancy free," though she was probably not permitted to escape the importunity of lovers. We can imagine her sometimes to have undergone much what Emma Woodhouse experienced from the attentions of Mr. Elton, when that reverend gentleman had taken just enough wine to embolden without confusing him. But whatever her acquaintance with the tender passion, it is clear that she was the

idol of a large family circle. "Aunt Jane" was the universal resource and referee in all domestic matters. She counselled the improvident, nursed the invalid, sympathised with the lovers, and told fairy tales to the children, like a second Scheherazade. She was evidently a cheerful, good-natured, contented young woman, satisfied with life as she found it, exempt from its depressing cares, and unconscious of its deeper problems. The placidity of her temper, the soundness of her mind, and her total freedom from egotism, are shown by the fact that she wrote all her novels at a little desk in the common sitting-room of the family, exposed to constant interruption, yet never for a moment ruffled, or leading any one to suspect that she was occupied with business of importance. It is indeed not improbable that she was rewarded for her self-possession by finding that many of her morning visitors were qualified to serve as models; and that, while she seemed to be listening with ready politeness to the gossip of some village bore, she was quietly taking his likeness, and forming in her own mind a Mr. Collins or a Miss Bates. In her habits and tastes she was simple, quiet, and unobtrusive. Her neat-handedness was proverbial. She was a mistress of needlework; unrivalled at "spilikins" and cup and ball; and celebrated for her nicety in the folding and sealing of letters. Consistently with these traits, she seems to have led an indoor and rather hothouse kind of existence. We see no traces in her books, and none are supplied by the biographer, of that love of nature, and of outdoor exercise, that fondness for flowers, birds, dogs, and all kinds of domestic pets, which distinguished Miss Mitford. Aunt Jane, we should think, was one of those ladies who took a constitutional every day round the garden, wearing pattens when the ground was damp; who liked dogs very well in their places, as if any place could be too good for them; and thought a nicely set-out tea-table, with a clean hearth and a clear fire, worth all the scenery in Hampshire. In all her novels we can recall only a single passage which betrays any of that sympathy with the varying moods of nature, so abundant in the younger authoress, and which modern poetry has recently revived among us: Anne Elliot, we think it is, in "Persuasion," who is sorry to leave the country in autumn because of the "pleasing sadness" with which that season of the year affects her.

No doubt Miss Austen belongs essentially to the eighteenth-century school of literature. There is little we should now call romance in any one of her five novels. They are good genteel-comedies. They play over the surface of life, and represent its phenomena with the most finished elegance. But they do not stir the deeper passions, or more tumultuous emotions of our nature. We should question if a single page that Miss Austen has written has ever moistened the eyelid of the most impressionable man, woman, or child who has lived since she first began to write. On the other hand, the quiet fun,

the inexhaustible sly humour, the cheerful healthy tone, the exquisite purity, and the genuine goodness which are reflected in every line she wrote, carry us down the sluggish stream of her stories without either weariness or excitement, and with a constant sense of being amused, refreshed, and benefited. In these respects she has been compared to Addison. And we think the comparison a just one. If the reader will refer to Mr. Thackeray's essay upon Addison in his "Humorists of the Eighteenth Century," he will get, in our opinion, all due allowance being made for the difference of sex, age, and circumstances, no bad idea of Miss Austen. Many of her characters, too, are but country-bred editions of the flirts, and prudes, the "pretty men," and the conceited prigs who pass before the Silent Gentleman. The social circle from which her characters are taken has already been described. She never sought to go beyond it, neither peer nor peasant ever figures among her select dramatis persone. In this particular excellence but one English novelist is her rival; and, of course, the resemblance between Miss Austen and George Eliot has been the theme of every critic who has lately written upon the subject. But it has not been sufficiently observed that the common-place people whom George Eliot turns into characters, are not common-place in quite the same sense as Miss Austen's. They may be equally so absolutely, but they are not relatively. A Mr. Bennet, a Mr. Woodhouse, a Mrs. Norris, or a Mrs. Allen, a Catharine Morland, an Eleanor Dashwood, are characters, not only common enough in themselves, but common to the experience of all educated people. A Mrs. Poyser, a Mrs. Pullet or Mrs. Tulliver, a Mr. Macey, or Dolly Winthrop, are not. In making use of such characters as these George Eliot has all the advantage which the odd has over the familiar; the grotesque over the simple. Whether farmers, and peasants, and their wives would appreciate these characters, as we ourselves appreciate them, is a question that can never be solved. If they were sufficiently educated to appreciate such literature at all, the likeness would be lost, and the condition of the experiment be cancelled. If we allow that George Eliot is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, we must allow equally that in Miss Austen's case there is no doubt about the matter. And the conclusion is that the interest which an educated public feels in the Poysers, the Pullets, and the Maceys, is not proved to be the result of such high art as that which he feels in the Bertrams, the Bennets, and the Allens.

George Eliot can afford to make this concession to a sister novelist. Of all the ladies whose genius has enriched the highest fiction she is confessedly the first. In depth of feeling, in breadth of sympathy, and strength of imagination, she is as superior to Miss Austen as poetry is superior to prose. But the prose has merits of its own. And if Miss Austen's "two inches of ivory" sometimes show a

delicacy of touch which her great successor has not beaten, why should we grudge her the acknowledgment? To refuse her due, if it be her due, is no compliment to George Eliot, who has a thousand other claims upon our homage.

It was a necessity of Miss Austen's method that her plots should be less interesting than her persons. In fact, of the plot regular, with a mystery, an explosion, and a reconciliation, she presents no specimen; and our curiosity, we must own, is but faintly stimulated by the doubts and fears which beset her heroes and heroines en route for the altar. And it is a most remarkable circumstance that there is no other interest in her novels but what arises out of a passion to which she was herself a stranger. So many young men and so many young ladies stand up in couples as if they were going to dance a quadrille, and the various entanglements which await them form the whole action of the piece. Now one goes wrong, and now another, sometimes with serious, but oftener with comic, consequences. A few dresses are torn, and once a lady has a fall. But there are no bad hearts, and all winds up comfortably with the usual refreshments. Crime, calamity, and anguish enter not this placid sphere. Tragedy is not allowed to show even the tip of her buskin. Poverty and disgrace are hinted at, but, like murder, are excluded from the stage. In three words, the story is redolent always of the quiet respectability, the prosperous dulness, and the ignorance of passion which encircled Miss Austen's existence, and narrowed the range of her experience. But as soon as her personages begin to talk and unfold their own characters to our gaze, we cease to care how they act, how they are situated, or what is in store for them. The exhibition of human nature, unadulterated by sensational incidents, is the purest of treats. And that is what she gives to perfection.

To those critics who would ask us what moral purpose Miss Austen proposed to herself in these delineations of common-place society, it is perhaps enough to reply that every picture of human life, however trite or conventional, must have a moral of its own if we have only eyes to see it. Without plunging into any such profound question as the ethics of art in general, we may affirm that nearly all Miss Austen's novels have a very plain moral, and one that admits of easy application. All of them have a family likeness, and a general tendency to bring out into prominent relief the peril of being guided by appearances. The danger to which a young lady is exposed by imagining too readily that a polite gentleman is in love with her; and the danger to which a young gentleman is exposed by imagining too readily that a good-natured girl is in love with him; the misunderstandings that arise from careless conversation, from exaggerated reserve, from overrated pretensions, from all the little mistakes which create the common embarrassments of ordinary society; these are the minor mischiefs which her pen is devoted to