herself she can hardly be
said to have originated anything, though of course, if we could accept
the above quoted statement of Scott's, she indirectly originated a very
great deal.

Very different is the position occupied by Jane Austen, who was born at
Steventon in Hampshire on 16th December 1775, being the daughter of the
rector of that place, lived a quiet life chiefly at various places in
her native county, frequented good society in the rank of not the
richest country squires, to which her own family belonged, and died at
Winchester unmarried on 24th July 1817. Of her six completed novels,
_Sense and Sensibility_, _Pride and Prejudice_, _Mansfield Park_, and
_Emma_ were published during the last seven years of her life, while
_Northanger Abbey_ and _Persuasion_ appeared, for the first time with an
author's name, the year after her death. They had no enormous or sudden
popularity, but the best judges, from Scott downwards, at once
recognised their extraordinary merit; and it is not too much to say that
by the best judges, with rare exceptions, that merit has been
acknowledged with ever increasing fulness at once of enthusiasm and
discrimination to the present day. With Scott, Miss Austen is the parent
of nineteenth century fiction; or, to speak with greater exactness, she
is the mother of the nineteenth century novel, just as he is the father
of the nineteenth century romance.

One indeed of the most wonderful things about her is her earliness. Even
the dates of publication of her first books precede those of any
novelist of the same rank and the same modernity; but these dates are
misleading. _Northanger Abbey_ was written more than twenty years before
it appeared, and the bulk of _Pride and Prejudice_ (which some hold to
be the best and most characteristic of all) is known to have been as old
at least as _Northanger Abbey_. That is to say, almost at the very time
of the appearance of _Camilla_ (to which, by the way, Miss Austen was an
original subscriber), a book not strikingly more nineteenth century in
tone than the novels of Richardson, though a little more so in manners,
a girl even younger than Miss Burney herself had been when she wrote
_Evelina_ was drawing other girls, who, putting aside the most trivial
details of dress, speech, and so forth, might be living girls to-day.

The charm and the genius of Miss Austen are not universally admitted;
the touch of old fashion in external detail apparently discont