only) Mr. Collins changed his mind from Jane to Elizabeth “while Mrs.

Bennet was stirring the fire” (and we know how Mrs. Bennet would have

stirred the fire), when Mr. Darcy “brought his coffee-cup back

himself,” the touch in each case is like that of Swift—“taller by the

breadth of my nail”—which impressed the half-reluctant Thackeray with

just and outspoken admiration. Indeed, fantastic as it may seem, I

should put Miss Austen as near to Swift in some ways, as I have put her

to Addison in others.
This Swiftian quality appears in the present novel as it appears

nowhere else in the character of the immortal, the ineffable Mr.

Collins. Mr. Collins is really great; far greater than anything Addison

ever did, almost great enough for Fielding or for Swift himself. It has

been said that no one ever was like him. But in the first{xvii} place, he

was like him; he is there—alive, imperishable, more real than hundreds

of prime ministers and archbishops, of “metals, semi-metals, and

distinguished philosophers.” In the second place, it is rash, I think,

to conclude that an actual Mr. Collins was impossible or non-existent at

the end of the eighteenth century. It is very interesting that we

possess, in this same gallery, what may be called a spoiled first

draught, or an unsuccessful study of him, in John Dashwood. The

formality, the under-breeding, the meanness, are there; but the portrait

is only half alive, and is felt to be even a little unnatural. Mr.

Collins is perfectly natural, and perfectly alive. In fact, for all the

“miniature,” there is something gigantic in the way in which a certain

side, and more than one, of humanity, and especially eighteenth-century

humanity, its Philistinism, its well-meaning but hide-bound morality,

its formal pettiness, its grovelling respect for rank, its materialism,

its selfishness, receives exhibition. I will not admit that one speech