It would be impossible to cite fragments from her stories that would give any adequate notion of her manner and accomplishment; it would be very like showing the feather of a bird, to give an {268} idea of its swoop of wing. Perhaps _Pride and Prejudice_, though her first written work, is the one most characteristic. You do not get lost in its sentimental strains; you do not find surfeit of immaculate conduct. There are fine woods and walks; but there is plenty of mud, and bad-going. The very heroines you often want to clutch away from their uncomely surroundings; and as for the elderly Mrs. Bennett, whose tongue is forever at its "click-clack," you cannot help wishing that she might--innocently--get choked off the scene, and appear no more. But that is not the deft Miss Austen's way; that gossiping, silly, irritating _mater familias_, goes on to the very end--as such people do in life--making your bile rise; and when the rainbows of felicity come at last to arch over the scenes of _Pride and Prejudice_, Mrs. Bennett's clacking tongue is still strident, and still reminds you in the strongest possible way, that Miss Austen has been busy with the veriest actualities of life, and not with its pretty, shimmering vapors. _Persuasion_ is a less interesting book, and less complete than _Pride and Prejudice_; its heroine, {269} Anne Eliot, is not possessed of very salient qualities; hardly gaining or holding very earnest attention; yet with a quiet sense of duty, and such every-day fulfilment of it, as makes her righteously draw toward her all the triumphs of the little drama; a lost love is reclaimed by these quiet forces, and victory comes to crown her easy gentleness. _Northanger Abbey_ is weaker, but with bold, striking naturalism in it; all the littlenesses and plottings and vain speech of the Bath Pump-Room seem to come to life in its pages; to just such life as we may find about our Cape Mays, and Pequod, and Ocean houses, every blessed summer's day! Miss Austen's earlier novels, which made her reputation, were written before she was twenty-five, and published later, and under many difficulties--anonymously; so she had none of that public incense regaling her, which was set ablaze for the less capable Miss Burney; and it was almost as an unknown, strange, quiet gentlewoman that she went down, in the later years of her life, to the shores of the beautiful Southampton Waters--seeking health there; and again, on the same search to the higher lands of the {270} Hampshire downs--where she died, only forty-two, and lies buried under a black marble slab, which you may find under the vaults of the interesting old Cathedral of Winchester.