Miss Austen’s views on marriage are familiar to her readers, and need no comment. They must have been drawn from a careful survey of the society which surrounded her, a society composed for the most part of insensitive, unrebellious men and women who had the habit of making the best of things. At times the cynicism is a trifle too pronounced, as when Eleanor Dashwood asks herself why Mr. Palmer is so ill-mannered: “His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman. But she knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it.” At times simplicity and sincerity transcend the limits of likelihood, as when Elizabeth Watson says to her young sister: “I should not like marrying a disagreeable man any more than yourself; but I do not think there are many very disagreeable men. I think I could like any good-humoured man with a comfortable income.” At times a delicacy of touch lends distinction to the frankest worldliness, as when Mary Crawford generously applauds her brother Henry’s determination to marry Fanny Price: “I know that a wife you loved would be the happiest of women; and that even when you ceased to love, she would yet find in you the liberality and good breeding of a gentleman.” There is a lamentable lack of sentiment in even this last and happiest exposition of married life; but it expresses the whole duty of husbands, and the whole welfare of wives, as understood in the year 1814. If Jane Austen and Thackeray wrought their heroines with perfect and painstaking accuracy, Scott’s attitude was for the most part one of reprehensible indifference. His world was run by men, and the ringleted sylphs of seventeen (the word “flapper” had not then cast discredit on this popular age) play very simple parts. Ruskin, it may be remembered, ardently admired these young ladies, and held them up as models of “grace, tenderness and intellectual power” to all his female readers. It never occurred to the great moralist, any more than to the great story-teller, that a girl is something more than a set of assorted virtues. “To Scott, as to most men of his age,” observes an acute English critic, “woman was not an individual, but an institution--a toast that was drunk some time after Church and King.” Diana Vernon exists to be toasted. She has the “True blue And Mrs. Crewe”