game into the Hartfield family circle, as a suitable alternative for Mr. Elton’s enigmas, charades, conundrums, and polite puzzles, or for Mr. Woodhouse’s “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid,” which made him think of poor Isabella—who was very near being christened Catherine, after her grandmamma. The truth, surely, is that this place-hunting, this seeking to “identify” the imaginary with the actual map-marked spot, is only a part of the larger misconception of imaginative work—the misconception which leads to a perpetual search for the “originals” of an author’s personages, especially when these personages have a full, vivid life of their own. Jane Austen has often been compared to Shakespeare, ever since Macaulay set the fashion. Well, it is naturally upon Shakespeare that this misconception has wreaked its worst. Commentators have gravely presented us with the “original” of Falstaff, of Sir Toby Belch, of Dogberry—nay, of Iago. Surely, the only “originals” of these people were Shakespeare himself? What were they but certain Shakespearean moods, humours, intimate experiences, temptations felt, but resisted, impulses controlled in actual life but allowed free play in imaginative reverie? No one that I know of has been foolish enough to charge Jane Austen with “copying” any of her characters from actual individuals, but, if you are in quest of “identifications,” is it not possible to “identify” many of them, the women at any rate—for, of course, her women bear the stamp of authentic reality much more plainly than her men—is it not possible to identify them with sides, tendencies, moods of Jane Austen herself? Here, I know, I am at variance with a distinguished authority, from whom it is always rash to differ. Professor Raleigh says:—“Sympathy with her characters she frequently has, identity never. Not in the high-spirited Elizabeth Bennet, not in that sturdy young patrician Emma, not even in Anne Elliot of ‘Persuasion,’ is the real Jane Austen to be found. She stands for ever aloof.” Pass, for Emma and Elizabeth! But the “even” in the case of Anne gives me courage. We are not, of course, talking of identity in regard to external circumstances. Jane Austen was not the daughter of a Somersetshire baronet and did not marry a captain in the navy. But that Jane only “sympathized” with the heart and mind of Anne Elliot is to my thinking absurdly short of the truth. That the adventures of Anne’s soul, her heart-beatings, misgivings and intimate reassurances about Wentworth’s feeling for her had been Jane Austen’s own is to me as certain as though we had the confession under her own hand and seal. The woman who drew Anne’s timid, doubting, wondering love must have been in love herself and in that way. One short sentence settles that for me. The consciousness of love disposes Anne “to pity every one, as being less happy than herself.” What lover does not know that secret feeling? And if he had never loved, would he have guessed it by “sympathy”? (You