Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/109

 Rh "the character of Emma is perhaps too manœuvring and too plotting to be perfectly amiable," that of Catherine Morland "will not suffer greatly even from a comparison with Miss Burney's interesting Evelina"; and that "although one is occasionally annoyed by the underbred personages of Miss Austen's novels, the annoyance is only such as we should feel if we were actually in their company."

It was thus that our genteel great-grandmothers, enamoured of lofty merit and of refined sensibility, regarded Elizabeth Bennet's relations.