consolation to the former when she maunders over the entail, “My dear,

do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for better things.

Let us flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor;” and his inquiry

to his colossal cousin as to the compliments which Mr. Collins has just

related as made by himself to Lady Catherine, “May I ask whether these

pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment,{xix} or are the

result of previous study?” These are the things which give Miss Austen’s

readers the pleasant shocks, the delightful thrills, which are felt by

the readers of Swift, of Fielding, and we may here add, of Thackeray, as

they are felt by the readers of no other English author of fiction

outside of these four.
The goodness of the minor characters in Pride and Prejudice has been

already alluded to, and it makes a detailed dwelling on their beauties

difficult in any space, and impossible in this. Mrs. Bennet we have

glanced at, and it is not easy to say whether she is more exquisitely

amusing or more horribly true. Much the same may be said of Kitty and

Lydia; but it is not every author, even of genius, who would have

differentiated with such unerring skill the effects of folly and

vulgarity of intellect and disposition working upon the common

weaknesses of woman at such different ages. With Mary, Miss Austen has

taken rather less pains, though she has been even more unkind to her;

not merely in the text, but, as we learn from those interesting

traditional appendices which Mr. Austen Leigh has given us, in dooming

her privately to marry “one of Mr. Philips’s clerks.” The habits of

first copying and then retailing moral sentiments, of playing and

singing too long in public, are, no doubt, grievous and criminal; but

perhaps poor Mary was rather the scapegoat of the sins of blue stockings

in that Fordyce-belectured generation. It is at any rate difficult not