Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/19

 doings of Ennui; but the tide turned, though slowly, and it is difficult to tell by what steps Jane Austen reached her present secure pinnacle. Southey, Coleridge, Guizot, Lord Macaulay, Lord Holland, Whewell, and Lord Lansdowne, were all among the earlier of her warm admirers, and Sir James Mackintosh fired up in her defence when Mme. de Staël called her novels "vulgar." Lord Macaulay planned a new edition of her works, with a memoir prefixed, the profits of which should go to erecting a monument to her memory in Winchester Cathedral; but his death checked this project, and the memoir remained unwritten. It may seem curious that no biography of her was earlier attempted, but fifty or sixty years ago the popular taste was in favour of stirring incidents in a memoir; the idea of studying the development and cultivation of a rare character throughout its career was little entertained, and the Austen family had no wish to force the biography of one so beloved on an indifferent or uninterested public.

Jane Austen had the happiness of being surrounded by relations who prized all her endowments, mental and moral; who were able to help her with criticism and cheer her with wise praise, while from her earliest childhood she imbibed cultivation from her parents and the elder members of her family. Her father, George Austen, was a man of superior intellect, and of excellent education, which latter he owed partly to the generosity of a relative, but more to his own industry and love of learning. He was of good family—the Austens had been settled in Kent for many generations—but at eight years old he lost both his parents, and was penniless as well as an orphan. Through the liberality of an uncle he was sent to a good school at Tunbridge,