Scott’s literary career began with the publication of a translation of Burger’s “Lenore” in 1799, between that date and 1814 his poems appeared at intervals, and in 1814 his first great novel _Waverley_. Though it was anonymous, Jane seems to have discovered the secret of the authorship, for she writes: “Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet and ought not to be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths. I do not mean to like _Waverley_ if I can help it, but I fear I must.” But she was not the only one to make such a conjecture, for Miss Mitford having read _Waverley_ also imputes it unhesitatingly to him, she says, “If there be any belief in internal evidence it must be his.” Judging by these two specimens, the secret of Scott’s anonymity was not the great mystery it is generally imagined to have been. The third period, that of the great men who were actually contemporary with Jane Austen, though she was unconscious of their existence, as they did not win their laurels until after her death, is of course much less interesting, and may be quickly dismissed, such names as those of Lingard and Hallam among historians; Mill, Hazlitt, and De Quincey belong by right of birth to an earlier epoch, though their works place them in this. Miss Ferrier and Miss Mitford, too, were not much younger than Jane Austen, but neither had brought out anything noticeable before her death. Miss Ferrier’s first novel, _Marriage_, made its appearance in 1818; and though Miss Mitford had written poems, her _Our Village_ first appeared in the _Lady’s Magazine_ only in 1819. As we have seen, Miss Mitford was a scholar at the same school as Jane Austen, though many years later. She was also a native of Jane’s county, Hants. In the last decade of the eighteenth century were born among poets: Shelley, Keats, Hood, Keble, and Mrs. Hemans; among historians, Grote, Alison, Napier, Carlyle, and Thirlwall; among men of science, Faraday and Lyell; and among novelists, Marryat. In the beginning of the nineteenth century we have a string of great names; a trio of poets: Tennyson, Longfellow, and Browning; men of science such as Darwin; historians such as Macaulay; novelists in numbers, such as Dickens, Thackeray, Charles Reade, Harrison Ainsworth, Bulwer Lytton, and Trollope; statesmen such as Gladstone and Disraeli. Perhaps no forty years that could have been chosen at any period of English history would have covered such a variety of talent, and that of such a high order, as was given to the world during Jane Austen’s brief life. And if she did not know personally the men whose names have lived with her own, at all events she drew from their works inspiration and knowledge, and she herself was not by any means the least among so mighty a company. CHAPTER X A TRIO OF NOVELS