ly and
she left nothing else but a couple of fragments. One of these, _Lady
Susan_, does not, so far as it extends, promise much, though it is such
a fragment and such an evident first draft even of this, that judgment
of it is equally unfair and futile. The other, _The Watsons_, has some
very striking touches, but is also a mere beginning. _Persuasion_--which
appeared with _Northanger Abbey_ and which, curiously enough, has, like
its nearly twenty years elder sister, Bath for its principal scene--has
also some pretensions to primacy among the books, and is universally
admitted to be of its author's most delicate, most finished, and most
sustained work. And this, like _Emma_, resolutely abstains from even the
slightest infusion of startling or unusual incident, of "exciting"
story, of glaring colour of any kind: relying only on congruity of
speech, sufficient if subdued description, and above all a profusion of
the most delicately, but the most vividly drawn character, made to
unfold a plot which has interest, if no excitement, and seasoned
throughout with the unfailing condiment--the author's "own sauce"--of
gentle but piquant irony and satire.

It is not to be supposed or inferred that Miss Austen's methods, or her
results, have appealed to everybody. Madame de Stael thought her
_vulgaire_--meaning, of course, not exactly our "vulgar" but
"commonplace"; Charlotte Bronte was not much otherwise minded; her own
Marianne Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same. Readers without
some touch of letters may think her style old-fashioned: it has even
been termed "stilted." Not merely may amateurs of blood and thunder, of
passion and sensation, think her tame, but the more modern devotees of
"analysis" may consider her superficial. On the other hand, it is
notorious that, from her own day to this, she has never wanted
partisans, often of superlative competence, and of the most strikingly
different tempers, tastes, and opinions. The extraordinary quietness of
her art is only matched by its confidence: its subtlety by its strength.
She did not try many styles; she deliberately and no doubt wisely
refused to try the other style which was already carrying all before it
in her own later days. She seems to have confined herself (with what
seems to some high-flying judges an almost ignoble caution) to the
strata of society that she knew most thoroughly: and the curious have
noted that she seldom goes above a baronet, and hardly