Page:Essays in miniature.djvu/174

 170 type as another with the genius that revealed them all.

"Of Jane herself I know no definite love-tale to relate," says her nephew and biographer, Mr. Austen Leigh; and this seems about the conclusion of the matter. "No man's life could be more entirely free from sentiment," admits, very reluctantly, one of her cleverest critics. "If love be a woman's chief business, here is a very sweet woman who had no share in it. It is a want, but we have no right to complain, seeing that she did not shape her course to please us."

This is a generous reflection on the critic's part; but is the want so painfully apparent as he thinks, or may we not be well content with Jane Austen as we have her, the central figure of a little loving family group, the dearest of daughters and sisters, the gayest and brightest of aunts, the most charming and incomparable of old maids?