repose. At Hartfield there was certainly no
changing "from the blue chamber to the green," a revolution which would
have made Mr. Woodhouse seriously unwell.

Emma never seems to leave home, she had not seen the sea, nor indeed had
she (before a memorable occasion) explored Box Hill, a few miles away,
although her father kept a carriage and a pair of horses. Nor is there
any evidence of her going to London, a distance of sixteen miles. She
did not engage in good works; there were no committees or meetings except
those held at the 'Crown' at which Mr. Knightly and Mrs. Elton's _cara
sposo_ were the leaders, and where no ladies were admitted.

In comparison with the hurried unsheltered life of the modern girl, Emma
seems a princess shut in a tower of brass or an enchanted garden. And
although in the course of the story she escapes this particular tower, it
is only to fall into the castle of Mr. Knightly, who (with his squire
William Larkins) plays the part of knight errant.

And Emma was not dull, but full of happy animation, and her quiet life
encouraged the growth of an educated, or at least a cultivated, condition
which re-appears in the other novels. This placid life is all the more
striking in contrast to the great contemporary struggle of the Napoleonic
wars, hardly a sound of which reaches Miss Austen's readers, although in
_Persuasion_ we do hear something of Captain Wentworth's prize money.
George Eliot knew the flavour of this quietude, and reproduces it in the
introduction to _Felix Holt_. But even in these pre-reform days the
quiet is beginning to be broken; the stage-coachman is beginning to dread
the railway train, and looks on Mr. Huskisson's death as a proof of God's
anger against Stephenson. Again, in _Middlemarch_ we see the country
stirring in its sleep, and poor Dorothea suffering in the process of
awakening. There is nothing of this in Miss Austen; it is true that the
Miss Bennets sometimes experienced the blankness of female existence, but
they could imagine nothing blanker than the departure of the militia from
Meryton.

Jane Austen's books have something of the quiet atmosphere of Cowper's
_Letters_. Mr. Austen Leigh in his _Memoir_ speaks of her love for the
writings of Cowper and of Crabbe (the latter indeed she proposed to
herself to marry). We know that Marianne Dashwood (that type of
sensibility) was very far from finding Cowper too quiet. For when Edward
Ferrars failed to read h