She dwells as little on misery as on guilt. She shows in her letters charitable regard for the poor people of Steventon and Chawton. She describes minutely the unkempt house of Lieutenant Price at Portsmouth with its incessant noise of heavy steps, banging doors, and untrained servants, where every voice was loud excepting Mrs. Price's, which resembled "the soft monotony of Lady Bertram's, only worn into fretfulness." Miss Austen's pen was able to portray scenes of squalor and vice; she chose to turn from them. Perhaps she felt instinctively that true æsthetic pleasure cannot be produced by dwelling on a scene in a book which would be repulsive to the eye. Miss Austen wrote before there was much serious interest in the lives of the poor. Their only function in literature had been to provoke laughter. The sensitive daughter of the rector of Steventon may have felt, as others have, that there was no occasion to laugh at the blunders and ill-manners of peasants, which were proper and natural to their condition of life. She did not need these people to entertain us. There were quite as funny people in the hall as in the cottage, funnier, even, because their humorous sayings spring from a humorous twist in their natures, not from ignorance. Sir Walter Scott, after reading _Pride and Prejudice_ for the third time, said: "That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me." Sir Walter Scott proved the truth of the above statement in _St. Ronan's Well_, one of the least successful of his novels, which was written in imitation of Jane Austen. Because Jane Austen confined her work so closely to ordinary middle-class people, she has been called narrow. But if we judge men and women not by dress and manners, but by what they are, these people furnish as broad a view of humanity as could be obtained by travelling up and down the world. A trained botanist will gather an herbarium from a country lane that will give a more extended knowledge of botany than a less skilful one could get by travelling through the woods and fields of a continent. Very few novelists have portrayed greater varieties of human nature than Miss Austen. Jane Austen's style has been praised by all critics. George William Curtis wrote of her art: "She writes wholly as an artist, while George Eliot advocates views, and Miss Brontë's fiery page is often a personal protest. In Miss Austen, on the other hand, there is in kind, but infinitely less in degree, the same clear atmosphere of pure art which we perceive in Shakespeare and Goethe."