It is a mercy that Jane Austen never describes houses—never describes them, I mean, with the minute (and tedious) particularity of a Balzac—or the topographical game would have been supplemented by an architectural one, and we should have had the “real” Mansfield Park pointed out to us from its description, like Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. Indeed, she never, in the modern sense, describes anything, never indulges in description for its own sake. She never even expatiated on the beauties of nature, taking them for granted and, indeed, on at least one famous occasion—when strawberries were being picked while the apple trees were still in bloom at Donwell Abbey—rather mixing them up. Her descriptions always had a practical purpose. If it rained in Bath, it was in order that Anne might, or might not, meet Captain Wentworth. We know that Sir Thomas’s “own dear room” at Mansfield Park was next to the billiard-room, because the novelist wanted us to know how he came plump upon the ranting Mr. Yates. But that detail, thank goodness, won’t enable us to “identify” Mansfield Park. Doesn’t it argue a rather matter-of-fact frame of mind—I say it with all respect to the correspondents of the _Literary Supplement_—this persistent tendency to “identify” the imaginary with the actual, the geographical, the historical? There is a notable instance of it in the Letters of Henry James. The novelist had described in “The Bostonians” a certain veteran philanthropist, “Miss Birdseye.” Forthwith all Boston identified the imaginary Miss Birdseye with a real Miss Peabody. “I am quite appalled,” writes Henry James to his brother William, “by your note in which you assault me on the subject of my having painted a ‘portrait from life’ of Miss Peabody! I was in some measure prepared for it by Lowell’s (as I found the other day) taking it for granted that she had been my model, and an allusion to the same effect in a note from aunt Kate. Still, I didn’t expect the charge to come from you. I hold that I have done nothing to deserve it.... Miss Birdseye was conceived entirely from my moral consciousness, like every other person I have ever drawn.” It is odd that a man like William James, a professed student of the human mind and its workings, should have made such a mistake. I remember a saying attributed, years ago, to Jowett about the two brothers: one, he remarked, was a writer of fiction and the other a psychologist, and the fiction was all psychology and the psychology all fiction. Anyhow, I think if any one had written to Jane Austen to tax her with Highbury being Esher or Mansfield Park Easton Neston, she would have been able to reply that they were conceived entirely from her moral consciousness. And I fancy she would have smiled at her little trick of giving the exact mileage from her imaginary centre to real places having “sold” so many worthy people. Very likely she would have brought the topographical