which
one can imagine to be forms of Lady Bertram's emptiness and Mrs. Norris's
hardness.

This is a subject on which a Mendelian inquirer might endlessly
speculate, but the characters in fiction being even less susceptible to
experiment than our living friends and acquaintance, the interest of the
matter is soon exhausted.

It is to be regretted that Miss Austen did not allow the characters of
one novel to appear in the next. It is true that this would have upset
plots in an absurd way, but I should like to know what would have
happened if, when Henry Tilney had made up his mind that he was in love
with Catherine, Elizabeth Bennet had appeared? He would surely have
repented of his entanglement with Catherine. There is, however, this to
be said, that I strongly suspect Elizabeth of being his first cousin.
She is so like him that she might have failed to please him, or he may
have known her from a little girl and looked on her as a sister. Or the
marriages of cousins may have been as impossible among the Tilneys as in
the Royal Family of Crim Tartary, where Bulbo's beautiful Circassian
cousin simply had to be allowed to die of love for him.

There are many possibilities in the combination of characters now
separated by inexorable paper and ink. One can imagine a meeting at Bath
between General Tilney and Sir Walter Elliott; they would clearly
sympathise, and unless the General has injured his complexion by
incautious zeal on active service, which seems unlikely, Sir Walter would
have had "no objection to being seen with him anywhere"; he might even
have walked arm-in-arm with him as he did with Colonel Wallis, who "was a
fine military figure, though sandy haired." Again, Mr. Collins would
have been charmed with Mr. Dashwood in _Sense and Sensibility_, for
although the two characters are not quite similarly compounded of
snobbery and folly, yet there is a common substratum of meanness that
must have served as a bond.

It would be interesting to treat the whole of Miss Austen's characters as
the flora of a given land is dealt with, to divide them into genera and
species, and to provide an analytical key. Take, for instance, the young
men: these would correspond to a Natural Order, say the Ranunculaceae,
and may be divided, as the following table shows, into two groups,
Attractive and Unattractive, and these are subdivided again into four
groups which correspond to genera. No. 1, which we should call
Brandonia