Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry
Tilney, Mr. Edward Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens
of the upper part of the middle class. They have been all liberally
educated. They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred
profession. They are all young. They are all in love. Not any one of
them has any hobby-horse, to use the phrase of Sterne. Not one has any
ruling passion, such as we read in Pope. Who would not have expected
them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon
is not more unlike Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike Sir
Lucius O'Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen's young divines to
all his reverend brethren. And almost all this is done by touches
so delicate that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of
description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect
to which they have contributed."

Dr. Whately, the Archbishop of Dublin, in the "Quarterly Review,"
1821, sums up his estimate of Miss Austen with these words: "The
Eastern monarch who proclaimed a reward to him who should discover a
new pleasure would have deserved well of mankind, had he stipulated
it should be blameless. Those again who delight in the study of human
nature may improve in the knowledge of it, and in the profitable
application of that knowledge, by the perusal of such fictions. Miss
Austen introduces very little of what is technically called religion
into her books, yet that must be a blinded soul which does not
recognize the vital essence, everywhere present in her pages, of a
deep and enlightened piety.

There are but few descriptions of scenery in her novels. The figures
of the piece are her care; and if she draws in a tree, a hill, or a
manor-house, it is always in the background. This fact did not arise
from any want of appreciation for the glories or the beauties of the
outward creation, for we know that the pencil was as often in her hand
as the pen. It was that unity of purpose, ever present to her mind,
which never allowed her to swerve from the actual into the ideal, nor
even to yield to tempting descriptions of Nature which might be near,
and yet aside from the main object of her narrative. Her creations
are living people, not masks behind which the author soliloquizes
or lectures. These novels are impersonal; Miss Austen never herself
appears; and if she ever had a lover, we cannot decide whom he
resembled among the many masculine portraits she has drawn.

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