dy begin to fear, that we have indulged too much in extracts,
and we must save some room for _Persuasion_, or we could not resist
giving a specimen of John Thorpe, with his horse that _cannot_ go less
than 10 miles an hour, his refusal to drive his sister "because she has
such thick ankles," and his sober consumption of five pints of port a
day; altogether the best portrait of a species, which, though almost
extinct, cannot yet be quite classed among the Palaeotheria, the Bang-up
Oxonian. Miss Thorpe, the jilt of middling life, is, in her way, quite
as good, though she has not the advantage of being the representative of
a rare or a diminishing species. We fear few of our readers, however
they may admire the naivete, will admit the truth of poor John Morland's
postscript, "I can never expect to know such another woman."

The latter of these novels, however, _Persuasion_, which is more
strictly to be considered as a posthumous work, possesses that
superiority which might be expected from the more mature age at which it
was written, and is second, we think, to none of the former ones, if not
superior to all. In the humorous delineation of character it does not
abound quite so much as some of the others, though it has great merit
even on that score; but it has more of that tender and yet elevated kind
of interest which is aimed at by the generality of novels, and in
pursuit of which they seldom fail of running into romantic extravagance:
on the whole, it is one of the most elegant fictions of common life we
ever remember to have met with.

Sir Walter Elliot, a silly and conceited baronet, has three daughters,
the eldest two, unmarried, and the third, Mary, the wife of a
neighbouring gentleman, Mr. Charles Musgrove, heir to a considerable
fortune, and living in a genteel cottage in the neighbourhood of the
Great house which he is hereafter to inherit. The second daughter, Anne,
who is the heroine, and the only one of the family possessed of good
sense (a quality which Miss Austin is as sparing of in her novels, as we
fear her great mistress, Nature, has been in real life), when on a visit
to her sister, is, by that sort of instinct which generally points out
to all parties the person on whose judgment and temper they may rely,
appealed to in all the little family differences which arise, and which
are described with infinite spirit and detail.

* * * * *

We ventured, in a former article, t