"Shakspeare has neither equal nor second; but among writers who, in the point we have noticed, have approached nearest the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, as a woman of whom England is justly 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. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom,--Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edward Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class. They have been all liberally educated. They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. They are all young. They are all in love. Not any one of them has any hobby-horse, to use the phrase of Sterne. Not one has any ruling passion, such as we read in Pope. Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon is not more unlike Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike Sir Lucius O'Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen's young divines to all his reverend brethren. And almost 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." Dr. Whately, the Archbishop of Dublin, in the "Quarterly Review," 1821, sums up his estimate of Miss Austen with these words: "The Eastern monarch who proclaimed a reward to him who should discover a new pleasure would have deserved well of mankind, had he stipulated it should be blameless. Those again who delight in the study of human nature may improve in the knowledge of it, and in the profitable application of that knowledge, by the perusal of such fictions. Miss Austen introduces very little of what is technically called religion into her books, yet that must be a blinded soul which does not recognize the vital essence, everywhere present in her pages, of a deep and enlightened piety.