You may say that the soul’s travailings are no affair of yours; proving thereby that you have indeed but a lowly conception of the duty of the novelist. I only remember one reference, in all your works, to that controversy which occupies the chief of our attention—the great controversy on Creation or Evolution. Your Jane Bennet cries: “I have no idea of there being so much Design in the world as some persons imagine.” Nor do you touch on our mighty social question, the Land Laws, save when Mrs. Bennet appears as a Land Reformer, and rails bitterly against the cruelty “of settling an estate away from a family of five daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about.” There, madam, in that cruelly unjust performance, what a text you had for a _tendenz-romanz_. Nay, you can allow Kitty to report that a Private had been flogged, without introducing a chapter on Flogging in the Army. But you formally declined to stretch your matter out, here and there, “with solemn specious nonsense about something unconnected with the story.” No “padding” for Miss Austen! in fact, madam, as you were born before Analysis came in, or Passion, or Realism, or Naturalism, or Irreverence, or Religious Open-mindedness, you really cannot hope to rival your literary sisters in the minds of a perplexed generation. Your heroines are not passionate, we do not see their red wet cheeks, and tresses dishevelled in the manner of our frank young Mænads. What says your best successor, a lady who adds fresh lustre to a name that in fiction equals yours? She says of Miss Austen: “Her heroines have a stamp of their own. _They have a certain gentle self-respect and humour and hardness of heart_ . . . Love with them does not mean a passion as much as an interest, deep and silent.” I think one prefers them so, and that Englishwomen should be more like Anne Elliot than Maggie Tulliver. “All the privilege I claim for my own sex is that of loving longest when existence or when hope is gone,” said Anne; perhaps she insisted on a monopoly that neither sex has all to itself. Ah, madam, what a relief it is to come back to your witty volumes, and forget the follies of to-day in those of Mr. Collins and of Mrs. Bennet! How fine, nay, how noble is your art in its delicate reserve, never insisting, never forcing the note, never pushing the sketch into the caricature! You worked, without thinking of it, in the spirit of Greece, on a labour happily limited, and exquisitely organised. “Dear books,” we say, with Miss Thackeray—“dear books, bright, sparkling with wit and animation, in which the homely heroines charm, the dull hours fly, and the very bores are enchanting.” IX. _To Master Isaak Walton_.