ndham, Sheridan, among the admiring
friends who assured her that no flight in fiction or the drama was
beyond her powers. But the creator of Elizabeth Bennet, of Emma, and of
Mr. Collins, never met an author of eminence, received no encouragement
to write except that of her own family, heard no literary talk, and
obtained in her lifetime but the slightest literary recognition. It was
long after her death that Walter Scott wrote in his journal:--"Read
again, and 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 commonplace things and characters interesting from the
truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me." It was
still later that Macaulay made his famous estimate of her
genius:--"Shakespeare has neither equal nor second; but among those who,
in the point we have noticed (the delineation of character), approached
nearest the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen
as a woman of whom England may justly be 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.... And
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." And a new
generation had almost forgotten her name before the exacting Lewes
wrote:--"To make our meaning precise, we would say that Fielding and
Jane Austen are the greatest novelists in the English language.... We
would rather have written 'Pride and Prejudice' or 'Tom Jones,' than
any of the Waverley novels.... The greatness of Miss Austen (her
marvelous dramatic power) seems more than anything in Scott akin to
Shakespeare."

The six novels which have made so great a reputation for their author
relate the least sensational of histories in the least sensational way.
'Sense and Sensibility' might be called a novel with a purpose, that
purpose being to portray the dangerous haste with which sentiment
degenerates into sentimentality; and because of its purpose, the s