A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Opinions of Eminent Persons 113
deeply versed in works of fiction. I recollect his writing to me
from Caernarvon, where he had the charge of some pupils, that
he was weary of his stay, for he had read the circulating library
twice through.
‘During a visit I paid to Lord Lansdowne,° at Bowood, in 1846,
one of Miss Austen’s novels became the subject of conversation
and of praise, especially from Lord Lansdowne, who observed
that one of the circumstances of his life which he looked back
upon with vexation was that Miss Austen should once have been
living some weeks in his neighbourhood without his knowing it.
‘I have heard Sydney Smith,° more than once, dwell with eloquence
on the merits of Miss Austen’s novels. He told me he
should have enjoyed giving her the pleasure of reading her praises
in the “Edinburgh Review.” “Fanny Price” was one of his prime
favourites.’
I close this list of testimonies, this long ‘Catena Patrum,’° with
the remarkable words of Sir Walter Scott, taken from his diary for
March 14, 1826: 1 ‘Read again, for the third time at least, Miss
Austen’s finely written° novel of “Pride and Prejudice.” 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 common-place things and characters interesting from
the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me.
What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!’ The well-worn
condition of Scott’s own copy of these works attests that they
were much read in his family. When I visited Abbotsford, a few
years after Scott’s death, I was permitted, as an unusual favour, to
take one of these volumes in my hands. One cannot suppress the
wish that she had lived to know what such men thought of her
powers, and how gladly they would have cultivated a personal
acquaintance with her. I do not think that it would at all have
impaired the modest simplicity of her character; or that we should
have lost our own dear ‘Aunt Jane’ in the blaze of literary fame.
1
Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vol. vi. chap. vii.