During her lifetime she had not a single literary friend. Other women novelists possessed their sponsors and devotees. Miss Ferrier was the delight of a brilliant Edinboro' coterie. Miss Edgeworth was feasted and flattered, not only in England, but on the Continent; Miss Burney counted Johnson, Burke, Garrick, Windham, Sheridan, among the admiring friends who assured her that no flight in fiction or the drama was beyond her powers. But the creator of Elizabeth Bennet, of Emma, and of Mr. Collins, never met an author of eminence, received no encouragement to write except that of her own family, heard no literary talk, and obtained in her lifetime but the slightest literary recognition. It was long after her death that Walter Scott wrote in his journal:--"Read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's finely written novel of _Pride and Prejudice_. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me." It was still later that Macaulay made his famous estimate of her genius:--"Shakespeare has neither equal nor second; but among those who, in the point we have noticed (the delineation of character), approached nearest the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen as a woman of whom England may justly be 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 all this is done by touches so delicate that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed." And a new generation had almost forgotten her name before the exacting Lewes wrote:--"To make our meaning precise, we would say that Fielding and Jane Austen are the greatest novelists in the English language.... We would rather have written 'Pride and Prejudice' or 'Tom Jones,' than any of the Waverley novels.... The greatness of Miss Austen (her marvelous dramatic power) seems more than anything in Scott akin to Shakespeare."