imes and persons because it is
universal like its creator's soul. Still less did he do it by adopting
the method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybody
else has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:--that is to say by
constructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method was nearer to this
latter. For historical creations (the most important of his
non-historic, _Guy Mannering_ and the _Antiquary_, were so near his own
time that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to
a period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint by
actual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary,
literature, where he could get it. He has done this so consummately that
perhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us as
artificial is the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be
"up-to-date"--_St. Ronan's Well_.

This question of "Lingo," on the other hand, was Miss Austen's weakest
point: and we have seen and shall see that it continued to be a weak
point with others. Some admirers have defended her even here: but proud
as I am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of the
order of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length. She very nearly
succeeded, and sometimes she did quite: but not always. The easy
dialogue and phrase that we find as early as Horace Walpole, even as
Chesterfield and Lady Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days,
appears in Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not seem
always within Miss Austen's grasp. But her advance in this respect is
enormous: she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in _St. Ronan's
Well_: and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged
in unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarely
goes even a hair's-breadth wrong. In almost every other respect she does
not go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair. The story
is the least part with her: but her stories are always miraculously
_adequate_: neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with
the minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quite
indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to a
few who are not quite of negligible judgment. But the reason of this
adequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph. Not being a
poet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poetic
phrase: though she sometimes comes not