or one action of this inestimable man is incapable of being reconciled

with reality, and I should not wonder if many of these words and actions

are historically true.
But the greatness of Mr. Collins could not have been so satisfactorily

exhibited if his creatress had not adjusted so artfully to him the

figures of Mr. Bennet and of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. The latter, like

Mr. Collins himself, has been charged with exaggeration. There is,

perhaps, a very faint shade of colour for the charge; but it seems to me

very faint indeed. Even now I do not think that it would be impossible

to find persons, especially female persons, not necessarily of noble

birth, as overbearing, as{xviii} self-centred, as neglectful of good manners,

as Lady Catherine. A hundred years ago, an earl’s daughter, the Lady

Powerful (if not exactly Bountiful) of an out-of-the-way country parish,

rich, long out of marital authority, and so forth, had opportunities of

developing these agreeable characteristics which seldom present

themselves now. As for Mr. Bennet, Miss Austen, and Mr. Darcy, and even

Miss Elizabeth herself, were, I am inclined to think, rather hard on him

for the “impropriety” of his conduct. His wife was evidently, and must

always have been, a quite irreclaimable fool; and unless he had shot her

or himself there was no way out of it for a man of sense and spirit but

the ironic. From no other point of view is he open to any reproach,

except for an excusable and not unnatural helplessness at the crisis of

the elopement, and his utterances are the most acutely delightful in the

consciously humorous kind—in the kind that we laugh with, not at—that

even Miss Austen has put into the mouth of any of her characters. It is

difficult to know whether he is most agreeable when talking to his wife,

or when putting Mr. Collins through his paces; but the general sense of

the world has probably been right in preferring to the first rank his