became a really popular
author in her lifetime.

She was rewarded as poorly in credit as in cash, though the Prince
Regent became an enthusiastic admirer of her books, and kept a set of
them in each of his residences. It was the Prince Regent's librarian,
the Rev. J.S. Clarke, who, on becoming chaplain to Prince Leopold of
Saxe-Coburg, made the suggestion to her that "an historical romance,
illustrative of the history of the august House of Coburg, would just
now be very interesting." Mr. Collins, had he been able to wean himself
from Fordyce's _Sermons_ so far as to allow himself to take an interest
in fiction, could hardly have made a proposal more exquisitely
grotesque. One is glad the proposal was made, however, not only for its
own sake, but because it drew an admirable reply from Miss Austen on the
nature of her genius. "I could not sit seriously down," she declared,
"to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life;
and, if it were indispensable for me to keep it up, and never relax into
laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before
I had finished the first chapter."

Jane Austen knew herself for what she was, an inveterate laugher. She
belonged essentially to the eighteenth century--the century of the wits.
She enjoyed the spectacle of men and women making fools of themselves,
and she did not hide her enjoyment under a pretence of unobservant
good-nature. She observed with malice. It is tolerably certain that Miss
Mitford was wrong in accepting the description of her in private life as
"perpendicular, precise, taciturn, a poker of whom every one is afraid."
Miss Austen, one is sure, was a lady of good-humour, as well as a
novelist of good-humour; but the good-humour had a flavour. It was the
good-humour of the satirist, not of the sentimentalizer. One can imagine
Jane Austen herself speaking as Elizabeth Bennet once spoke to her
monotonously soft-worded sister. "That is the most unforgiving speech,"
she said, "that I ever heard you utter. Good girl!"

Miss Austen has even been accused of irreverence, and we occasionally
find her in her letters as irreverent in the presence of death as Mr.
Shaw. "Only think," she writes in one letter--a remark she works into a
chapter of _Emma_, by the way--"of Mrs. Holder being dead! Poor woman,
she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to make
one cease to abuse her." And on another occasion she writes: "Mr