Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ or ‘Tom Jones,’ than any of the Waverley Novels? I had not seen ‘Pride and Prejudice’ till I read that sentence of yours--and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, high-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.... George Sand is sagacious and profound; Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant.... You say I must familiarize my mind with the fact that “Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no ‘sentiment,’ no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry,”--and then you add, I _must_ learn to acknowledge her as _one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character_, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived. The last point only will I ever acknowledge. Can there be a great artist without poetry? CHARLOTTE BRONTË: _Letter to G. H. Lewes_, 1848, in the former’s ‘Life,’ by E. C. Gaskell. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1858. * * * * * It was in this year, I think (1865), that Mrs. Cameron wrote an undated letter in which mention is made of Tennyson: [Sidenote: Tennyson’s opinion.] “Alfred talked very pleasantly that evening to Annie Thackeray and L---- S----. He spoke of Jane Austen, as James Spedding does, as next to Shakespeare! I can never imagine what they mean when they say such things.... He said he believed every crime and every vice in the world were connected with the passion for autographs and anecdotes and records--that the desiring anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great men was treating them like pigs to be ripped open for the public; that he knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; that he thanked God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew nothing, and that the world knew nothing, of Shakespeare but his writings; and that he thanked God Almighty that he knew nothing of Jane Austen, and that there were no letters preserved either of Shakespeare’s or of Jane Austen’s.”[8] HENRY TAYLOR: ‘Autobiography.’ London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885. FOOTNOTES: [8] This was several years before the publication of the “Austen-Leigh Memoir.” JOANNA BAILLIE. 1762-1851. JOANNA BAILLIE.