Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/31

 and as to what was then thought of the dead languages for them, all readers of Hannah More must remember her bashful heroine who put the cream into the tea-pot and the sugar into the milk-jug on it being discovered that she read Latin with her father!

Jane Austen risked no such overwhelming discovery, but she was well acquainted with the standard writers of her time, and had a fair knowledge of miscellaneous literature. Crabbe, Cowper, Johnson, and Scott were her favourite poets, though, rather oddly, she set Crabbe highest; and it was a standing joke in the family that she would have been delighted to become Mrs. Crabbe if she had ever been personally acquainted with the poet.

Old novels were her delight, and the influence of Richardson and Miss Burney may be traced in some of her early writings. I have always thought that her criticism on the Spectator in Northanger Abbey proves that she could have known very little of Steele and Addison's masterpieces; but tastes differ, and she may have been unlucky in her selections. She always took pleasure in calling herself "ignorant and uninformed," and in declaring that she hated solid reading; but her letters continually make mention of new books which she is reading, and there was a constant stream of literature setting through the rectory at Steventon, in which Jane shared quite as fully as any of the others.

The delight and pursuit of her life, however, from very early days, was writing, and she seems to have been permitted to indulge in this pleasure with very little restraint; all the more, perhaps, that no amount of scribbling ever succeeded in spoiling her excellent handwriting. After she grew up to womanhood she