The silliness of Mrs. Palmer, with her final summary on the recreant Willoughby, “She was determined to drop his acquaintance immediately, and she was very thankful she had never been acquainted with him at all. She wished with all her heart Combe Magna was not so near Cleveland, but it did not signify for it was a great deal too far off to visit; she hated him so much that she was resolved never to mention his name again, and she should tell everyone she saw how good for nothing he was,” is entirely different from the continuous weak outpourings of poor little Miss Bates. “And when I brought out the baked apples from the closet, and hoped our friends would be so very obliging as to take some, ‘Oh,’ said he directly, ‘there is nothing in the way of fruit half so good, and these are the finest looking home-baked apples I ever saw in my life.’ That, you know, was so very— And I am sure by his manner it was no compliment. Indeed, they are very delightful apples, and Mrs. Wallis does them full justice, only we do not have them baked more than twice, and Mr. Woodhouse made us promise to have them done three times; but Miss Woodhouse will be so good as not to mention it. The apples themselves are the very finest sort for baking beyond a doubt—” and so on and so on for a page or more. The truth is that Jane Austen seized on qualities which are frequently found in human nature, and developed them with such fidelity that nearly all of us feel that we have at one time or another met a Miss Bates or a Mrs. Norris, or that we can see traits in others which resemble theirs; it is this which makes the appeal to all humanity. She did not take one person out of her acquaintance and depict him or her, but represented, in characters of her own creating, these salient traits which will ever revive perennially while men and women exist. Lord Macaulay does not hesitate to speak of Jane in the same breath with Shakespeare. “Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second, but among the writers who have approached nearest to the manner of the great Master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day, yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings.” And Archbishop Whateley makes the suggestive remark, “It is no fool that can describe fools well.” Before the birth of Jane Austen, the novel, which had been hardly considered in England for many centuries, had suddenly found a quartette of exponents which had placed the country in the foremost rank of this branch.