ll. This one thing I do. But the man who does this thing is
not intrinsically any greater than those who appreciate it--in fact, they
are all made of the same kind of stuff. Kipling himself is quite a
commonplace person. He is neither handsome nor magnetic. He is plain and
manly and would fit in anywhere. If there was a trunk to be carried
upstairs, or an ox to get out of a pit, you'd call on Kipling if he
chanced that way, and he'd give you a lift as a matter of course, and then
go on whistling with hands in his pockets. His art is a knack practised to
a point that gives facility.

Jane Austen was a commonplace person. She swept, sewed, worked, and did
the duty that lay nearest her. She wrote because she liked to, and because
it gave pleasure to others. She wrote as well as she could. She had no
thought of immortality, or that she was writing for the ages--no more than
Shakespeare had. She never anticipated that Southey, Coleridge, Lamb,
Guizot and Macaulay would hail her as a marvel of insight, nor did she
suspect that a woman as great as George Eliot would declare her work
flawless.

But today strong men recognize her books as rarely excellent, because they
show the divinity in all things, keep close to the ground, gently
inculcate the firm belief that simple people are as necessary as great
ones, that small things are not necessarily unimportant, and that nothing
is really insignificant. It all rings true.

And so I sing the praises of the average woman--the woman who does her
work, who is willing to be unknown, who is modest and unaffected, who
tries to lessen the pains of earth, and to add to its happiness. She is
the true guardian angel of mankind!

No book published in Jane Austen's lifetime bore her name on the
title-page; she was never lionized by society; she was never two hundred
miles from home; she died when forty-two years of age, and it was sixty
years before a biography was attempted or asked for. She sleeps in the
cathedral at Winchester, and not so very long ago a visitor, on asking the
verger to see her grave, was conducted thither, and the verger asked: "Was
she anybody in particular? So many folks ask where she's buried, you
know!"

But this is changed now, for when the verger took me to her grave and we
stood by that plain black marble slab, he spoke intelligently of her life
and work. And many visitors now go to the cathedral, only because it is
the resting-place of Jane Austen, who lived a