manner
of drawing character. She perceives with an intuitive refinement the
delicate shadings of emotion, and describes them with the utmost care
and detail. Her heroines are especially fine, each one having an
interesting individuality, thoroughly natural and womanly. The minor
characters in Miss Austen's works are usually quaint and original. She
sees the oddities and foibles of people with the insight of the true
humorist, and paints them with most dexterous cunning.

William D. Howells, the chief American realist of the nineteenth
century, wrote in 1891 of her and her novels:--

"She was great and they were beautiful because she and they were
honest and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism
deals with it to-day. Realism is nothing more and nothing less than
the truthful treatment of material."

She was, indeed, a great realist, and it seems strange that she and
Scott, the great romanticist, should have been contemporaries. Scott
was both broad and big-hearted enough to sum up her chief
characteristics as follows:--

"That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of
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 one 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."

She died in 1817 at the age of forty-one and was buried in Winchester
Cathedral, fourteen miles from her birthplace. The merit of her work
was apparent to only a very few at the time of her death. Later years
have slowly brought a just recognition of the important position that
she holds in the history of the realistic novel of daily life. Of
still greater significance to the majority is the fact that the subtle
charm of her stories continues to win for her an enlarged circle of
readers.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850

[Illustration: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. _After the portrait by B.R.
Haydon_.]

Early Life and Training.--William Wordsworth was born in
Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770. He went to school in his ninth year
at Hawkshead, a village on the banks of Esthwaite Water, in the heart
of the Lake Country. The traveler who takes the pleasant journey on
foot or coach from Windermere to Coniston, passes through Hawkshead,
where he may see Wordsworth's name cut in a desk of the school which
he