How characteristic is Sir Walter Elliot's reply to the gentleman who is trying to bring a neighbour's name to his mind. "Wentworth? Oh, ay! Mr. Wentworth, the curate of Monkford. You misled me by the term _Gentleman_. I thought you were speaking of some man of property." And not the least amusing of these people is Mr. Elton's bride, a pert sort of woman who for some reason patronises everybody into whose company she is thrown. After meeting Mr. Knightley, by far the most consequential person about Highbury, she expresses her approval of him to Emma: "Knightley is quite the gentleman! I like him very much! Decidedly, I think, a very gentlemanlike man." And Emma wonders if Mr. Knightley has been able to pronounce this self-important newcomer as quite the lady. Pick out almost any speech at random, and anyone who is at all familiar with Miss Austen will easily recognise the speaker. This ability to describe people by such delicate touches has been highly praised by Macaulay in the essay on Madame D'Arblay before quoted. He thus compares Jane Austen with Shakespeare: "Admirable as he [Shakespeare] was in all parts of his art, we must admire him for this, that, while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature. Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second. But among the writers who, in the point which we have mentioned, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, 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 instance, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom, Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class. They have all been liberally educated. They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. They are all young. They are all in love. Not one of them has any hobbyhorse, to use the phrase of Sterne. Not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to Sir Lucius O'Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen's young divines to 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."