lection of her
person and character; and perhaps many may take an interest in a
delineation, if any such can be drawn, of that prolific mind whence
sprung the Dashwoods and Bennets, the Bertrams and Woodhouses, the
Thorpes and Musgroves, who have been admitted as familiar guests to the
firesides of so many families, and are known there as individually and
intimately as if they were living neighbours. Many may care to know
whether the moral rectitude, the correct taste, and the warm affections
with which she invested her ideal characters, were really existing in the
native source whence those ideas flowed, and were actually exhibited by
her in the various relations of life. I can indeed bear witness that
there was scarcely a charm in her most delightful characters that was not
a true reflection of her own sweet temper and loving heart. I was young
when we lost her; but the impressions made on the young are deep, and
though in the course of fifty years I have forgotten much, I have not
forgotten that 'Aunt Jane' was the delight of all her nephews and nieces.
We did not think of her as being clever, still less as being famous; but
we valued her as one always kind, sympathising, and amusing. To all this
I am a living witness, but whether I can sketch out such a faint outline
of this excellence as shall be perceptible to others may be reasonably
doubted. Aided, however, by a few survivors {3} who knew her, I will not
refuse to make the attempt. I am the more inclined to undertake the task
from a conviction that, however little I may have to tell, no one else is
left who could tell so much of her.

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, at the Parsonage House of
Steventon in Hampshire. Her father, the Rev. George Austen, was of a
family long established in the neighbourhood of Tenterden and Sevenoaks
in Kent. I believe that early in the seventeenth century they were
clothiers. Hasted, in his history of Kent, says: 'The clothing business
was exercised by persons who possessed most of the landed property in the
Weald, insomuch that almost all the ancient families of these parts, now
of large estates and genteel rank in life, and some of them ennobled by
titles, are sprung from ancestors who have used this great staple
manufacture, now almost unknown here.' In his list of these families
Hasted places the Austens, and he adds that these clothiers 'were usually
called the Gray Coats of Kent; and were a body so numerou