Miss Edgeworth is somewhat too avowedly didactic: that seems to be true of her, which the French critics, in the extravagance of their conceits, attributed to Homer and Virgil, viz:--that they first thought of a moral, and then framed a fable to illustrate it; she would, we think, instruct more successfully, and she would, we are sure, please more frequently, if she kept the design of teaching more out of sight, and did not so glaringly press every circumstance of her story, principal or subordinate, into the service of a principle to be inculcated, or information to be given.... Miss Edgeworth’s novels put us in mind of those clocks and watches which are condemned “a double or a treble debt to pay”; which, besides their legitimate object, to show the hour, tell you the day of the month or the week, give you a landscape for a dial-plate, with the second-hand forming the sails of a wind-mill, or have a barrel to play a tune, or an alarum to remind you of an engagement: all very good things in their way; but so it is that these watches never tell the time so well as those in which that is the exclusive object of the maker. Every additional movement is an obstacle to the original design. SIR WALTER SCOTT: ‘Miss Austen’s Novels,’ _London Quarterly Review_, January, 1821. ‘Scott’s Miscellanies,’ _vol. i_. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1841. JANE AUSTEN. 1775-1817. JANE AUSTEN. Jane Austen may be said to have had the happiness of being without a history. No other English woman of letters ever lived a life so entirely uneventful. Its monotony was unbroken by travel, or by acquaintance or even correspondence with other writers. Its placid flow was never interrupted by love, or there is at least no surface-ripple to tell us of the fact. We learn from the memoir by her nephew, the Rev. J. E. Austen-Leigh, that she was the daughter of a Hampshire clergyman; she had one sister, very dear to her, and several brothers, one of whom rose to the rank of admiral in the navy. Jane was born on the 16th of December, 1775. In the years 1796 and ’97, before she was twenty-three years old, she wrote the novel _Pride and Prejudice_; in 1797 and ’98, _Sense and Sensibility_, and _Northanger Abbey_. These works, however, waited fifteen years for a publisher; and Jane, who wrote merely for her own amusement, seems to have possessed her soul in patience. In 1801 the family removed to Bath; in 1805 the Rev. George Austen died, and they again removed to Southampton. In 1809 they settled at Chawton, Hampshire; and in 1811 Jane was at length enabled to publish _Sense and Sensibility_. It was followed in 1813 by _Pride and Prejudice_. _Mansfield Park_ appeared in 1814, and _Emma_ in 1816.