The same qualities appear throughout the other books, whether in more or less quintessence and with less or more alloy is a question rather of individual taste than for general or final critical decision. _Sense and Sensibility_, the first actually to appear (1811), is believed to have been written about the same time as _Pride and Prejudice_, which appeared two years later, and _Northanger Abbey_, which did not see the light till its author was dead. It is the weakest of the three--perhaps it is the weakest of all: but the weakness is due rather to an error of judgment than to a lack of power. Like _Northanger Abbey_ it has a certain dependence on something else: the extravagances of Marianne satirise the Sensibility-novel just as those of Catherine do the Terror-story of the immediate past. But it is on a much larger scale: and things of the kind are better in miniature. Moreover, the author's sense of creative faculty made her try to throw up and contrast her heroine with other characters, in a way which she had not attempted in _Northanger Abbey_: and good as these are in themselves, they make a less perfect whole. Indeed, in the order of thought, _Sense and Sensibility_ is the "youngest" of the novels--the least self-criticised. Nothing in it shows lack of power (John Dashwood and his wife are of the first order); a good deal in it shows lack of knowledge exactly how to direct that power. _Mansfield Park_ (1814), though hardly as brilliant as _Pride and Prejudice_, shows much more maturity than _Sense and Sensibility_. Much of it is quite consummate, the character of Mrs. Norris especially: and for subtly interwoven phrase without emphasis, conveying knowledge and criticism of life, it has few equals. But it has an elopement. _Emma_, which has perhaps on the whole been the most general favourite, may challenge that position on one ground beyond all question, though possibly not on all. It is the absolute triumph of that reliance on the strictly ordinary which has been indicated as Miss Austen's title to pre-eminence in the history of the novel. Not an event, not a circumstance, not a detail, is carried out of "the daily round, the common task" of average English middle-class humanity, upper and lower. Yet every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put _sub specie eternitatis_ by the sorcery of art. Few things could be more terrible--nothing more tiresome--than to hear the garrulous Miss Bates talk in actual life; few things are more delightful than to read her speeches as they occur here. An aspiring soul might feel disposed to "take and drown itself in a pail" (as one of Dickens's characters says) if it had to live the life which the inhabitants of Highbury are represented as living; to read about that life--to read about it over and over again--has been and is always likely to be one of the chosen delights of some of the best wits of our race. This is one of the paradoxes of art: and perhaps it is the most wonderful of them,