R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

72 Walter de la Marecompany. This awareness cannot depend on any lack ofartistry since, surely, it is never absent when Jane Austenis delighting us with her company. It has a subtle andpervasive effect extremely difficult to define. RhodaBroughton—vivid, impulsive, romantic, satirical; MrsOliphant—cultured, fervent yet amused, courageous andaustere; Mrs Lynn Linton—mordant, daunting, cold;Mrs Alexander—sympathetic, equable, just, tenderhearted;Jessie Fothergill—earnest, reserved, aspiring, alittle stilted; Mrs Annie Edwardes—bold, acute, worldly;Ouida—witty, cynical, flighty, odd; Rosa Carey—observant,sentimental, scrupulous, lover of scene and season;Jean Ingelow—oddly unreal, meandering, but with occasionalglints of penetrating imagination—mere glimpsesall of them, and of but a few of many, and on how slendera foundation. But how in a few words convey the phantomof personality, which in every one of us has so manystrands, as it disengages itself from a piece of pure inventionconcerned with imaginary scenes and characters,and whose influence when it is entirely unpremeditatedis only the more effective.But apart from this various and often delightful companionshipand apart from all pleasures and interests ofa literary kind that await the reader of this bygonefiction, it affords another diversion—and one which wascertainly not aimed at by its writers. At the merethought of it, indeed, the busy pen might at once havefallen idle from the nerveless fingers. None the less, alas,it may possibly prove the most entertaining—the charm,that is, and the illumination afforded by the old-fashioned.Here it is the realist, the copyist, who suffers most, or atany rate suffers most for the time being. Centuries hencethe antiquarian may fall upon his work as if it were thefuneral memorials of a Tutankhamen. After an intervalof fifty years its appearance is merely odd and queer and