ing out
character:

'"It is very true," said Marianne, "that admiration of landscape
scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and
tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first
defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind;
and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could
find no language to describe them in but what was worn and
hackneyed out of all sense and meaning."

'"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all the
delight in a fair prospect which you profess to feel. But, in
return, your sister must allow me to feel no more than I profess. I
like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles; I do not
like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if
they are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined,
tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles or thistles or heath
blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a
watch-tower, and a troop of tidy happy villagers please me better
than the finest banditti in the world."'[5]

There can be no doubt, indeed, that in the novels of this period two
main features of the modern story, the word-painting of scenery and
the analysis of subjective emotions, are conspicuously absent. Yet
among the manifold causes to which may be ascribed the wide recent
expansion of the Novel of Manners, we may well reckon the decisive
impulse that it received from these famous authoresses. They were, in
fact, the founders of the dominion which women bid fair to establish
over this class of fiction, where they are already extending it to a
degree that threatens to evict the men. Various circumstances have
co-operated toward this curious literary revolution. The conventional
romance, though apparently flourishing, was in their time on the brink
of a decline; and as women have never succeeded in the Novel of
Adventure--for the obvious reason that their tastes and experiences
are opposed to success--they had no difficulty in abandoning a
decaying school, and in throwing all their freshness of mind and
subtlety of observation into the department which precisely suited
their idiosyncrasy. The spread of education among female readers and
writers has undoubtedly aided them. And thus the rise of feminine
novelists has operated as a formidable contingent of fresh troops that
has joined the camp