When Mrs. Ritchie said of Jane Austen’s heroines that they have “a certain gentle self-respect, and humour, and hardness of heart,” she must have had Emma in her mind. Humour hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity; and Emma surveys her little world of Highbury very much as Miss Austen surveyed her little world of Steventon and Chawton, with a less piercing intelligence, but with the same appreciation of foibles, and the same unqualified acceptance of tedium. To a modern reader, the most striking thing about the life depicted in all these novels is its dullness. The men have occupations of some sort, the women have none. They live in the country, or in country towns. Of outdoor sports they know nothing. They walk when the lanes are not too muddy, and some of them ride. They play round games in the evening, and always for a stake. A dinner or a dance is an event in their lives; and as for acting, we know what magnificent proportions _it_ assumes when we are told that even to Henry Crawford, “in all the riot of his gratifications, it was as yet an untasted pleasure.” Emma, during the thirteen months in which we enjoy her acquaintance, finds plenty of mischief for her idle hands to do. Her unwarranted interference in the love affairs of two people whom it is her plain business to let alone is the fruit of ennui. Young, rich, nimble of wit and sound of heart, she lives through days and nights of inconceivable stupidity. She does not ride, and we have Mr. Knightley’s word for it that she does not read. She can sketch, but one drawing in thirteen months is the sum of her accomplishment. She may possibly have a regard for the “moral scenery” which Hannah More condescended to admire; but nature is neither law nor impulse to her soul. She knows little or nothing of the country about her own home. It takes the enterprising Mrs. Elton to get her as far as Box Hill, a drive of seven miles, though the view it commands is so fine as to provoke “a burst of admiration” from beholders who have apparently never taken the trouble to look at it before. “We are a very quiet set of people,” observes Emma in complacent defence of this apathy, “more disposed to stay at home than engage in schemes of pleasure.”