Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/108

 92 the noble Thaddeus nodding his hearse-like plumes,—Thaddeus dedicated to the "urbanity of the brave," and embalmed in the tears of Poland? The inscrutable creator of Lothair presented his puppet to a mocking world; but all England and much of the Continent dilated with correct emotions when Thaddeus, "uniting to the courage of a man the sensibility of a woman, and the exalted goodness of an angel" (I quote from an appreciative critic), knelt at Miss Beaufort's feet.

Ten years later "Pride and Prejudice" made its unobtrusive appearance, and was read by that "saving remnant" to whom is confided the intellectual welfare of their land. Mrs. Elwood, the biographer of England's "Literary Ladies," tells us, in the few careless pages which she deems sufficient for Miss Austen's novels, that there are people who think these stories "worthy of ranking with those of Madame d'Arblay and Miss Edgeworth"; but that in their author's estimation (and, by inference, in her own), "they took up a much more humble station." Yet, tolerant even of such inferiority, Mrs. Elwood bids us remember that