im aloud with spirit, Marianne remarks, "Nay,
mamma, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!"

Bagehot {63a} in his article on the _Letters of Cowper_ unconsciously
describes the life at Hartfield or Mansfield Park. Of Cowper he writes:
"Detail was his forte and quietness his element. Accordingly his
delicate humour plays over perhaps a million letters mostly descriptive
of events which no one else would have thought worth narrating, and yet
which, when narrated, show to us, and will show to persons to whom it
will be yet more strange, the familiar, placid, easy, ruminating,
provincial existence of our great grandfathers."

The domestic and intimate parts of life are the most lastingly happy, and
thus it is that an imaginary existence, which in some moods seems to be
unbearably humdrum, harmonises with the best parts of our own life. The
quiet winds that blow through Miss Austen's imagined land cannot turn
windmills or overset tall trees, but they can set going those tunelike
chains of simple experiences written on our memories by the quiet and
happy parts of life.

Imaginative writing is often compared to painting, and Miss Austen has
spoken {63b} of "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I
work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour."
But this gives a false impression, suggesting a niggling character from
which her work is free. What strikes one is rather how much she conveys
by touches which seem trifling until we realise the triumph of the
result. The effect is not a miniature, as the author suspects, but
something essentially broad in spite of its detail, like a picture by Jan
Steen.

To discuss why Jane Austen's humour is admirable, or how she reaches such
perfection in the drawing of character, seems to me as hopeless as to ask
by what means Bach or Beethoven wrote such divinely beautiful tunes. Her
powers are rendered even more admirable by the fact {64a} that she did
not draw portraits, so that no one could say _A_ is Mr. Collins and _B_
is Mrs. Palmer.

I think it is true, but not easily explained, that the simplest people in
her books give us most pleasure. Why is Admiral Croft so delightful, and
why do we read again and again the speech about his wife, who suffered
from sharing the exercise prescribed for her husband's gout? "She, poor
soul, is tied by the leg with a blister on one of her heels as big as a
three-shilling piece." Why do we delight in Mr. Wo