Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/30

Rh acute, impulsive, enthusiastic, and strong-minded; Mary, who, being the only plain one in the family, has worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, and is always impatient for display; and the two youngest, Lydia and Kitty, who are mad after red coats and balls, both vulgar hoydens, the one leading and the other led, active and passive voices of the same irregular verb. Their mother, Mrs. Bennett, is done to the life—a sort of Mrs. Nickleby, without the caricature. Mr. Collins, the prim, soft-headed, tuft-hunting clergyman (by the way, excepting Edmund Bertram, what a goodly fellowship Miss Austen's clergymen are!); Lady de Bourgh, his insolent, coarse-mannered patroness; Mr. Darcy, the heart-sound representative of pride and prejudice; the Bingley sisters, shallow, purse-proud, intriguing; Wickham, the artful, double-faced adventurer—profligate, impudent, and perennially smiling; and Mr. Bennett himself, that strange compound of the amiable and disagreeable, with that supremo talent of his for ironical humour: all these are models of drawing. In "Sense and Sensibility" there are exact representatives of vulgar good-temper and vulgar selfishness, in Mrs. Jennings and Lucy Steele respectively; and of good sense and sensitiveness, in the sisters Elinor and Marianne. But if we must give the precedence to any one of Miss Austen's novels, we incline to name "Emma," notwithstanding a little inconsistency in the character of the delightful heroine. The people we there consort with, please us mightily. It were hard to excel the humour with which Miss Bates is portrayed—that irresistible spinster, and eternal but most inoffensive gossip; or nervous, invalid, coddling Mr. Woodhouse; or that intolerably silly piece of egotism, Mr. Elton; and equally rare are the observation and delicacy employed in characterising Jane Fairfax and Mr. Knightley. The tale abounds in high feeling, sterling wisdom, and exquisite touches of art.

If this paper has something of the rechauffé odour of a "retrospective" review, it is written not without a "prospective" purpose; the writer being persuaded that Jane Austen needs but to be more widely known, to be more justly appreciated, and accordingly using this opportunity "by way of remembrance." If the Wizard of the North felt herand acknowledged at the "third reading" a yet more potent spell than at the first, surely, to know that so many living novel readers by w'holesale are uninitiated in her doctrine, is a thing to be classed under Pepys’s favourite comment—"which did vex me."