his sentiments; upon receiving a repulse, he looks abroad elsewhere, and enriches the Highbury society by uniting himself to a dashing young woman with as many thousands as are usually called ten, and a corresponding quantity of presumption and ill breeding. While Emma is thus vainly engaged in forging wedlock fetters for others, her friends have views of the same kind upon her, in favor of a son of Mr. Weston by a former marriage, who bears the name, lives under the patronage, and is to inherit the fortune, of a rich uncle. Unfortunately Mr. Frank Churchill had already settled his affections on Miss Jane Fairfax, a young lady of reduced fortune; but as this was a concealed affair, Emma, when Mr. Churchill first appears on the stage, has some thoughts of being in love with him herself; speedily, however, recovering from that dangerous propensity, she is disposed to confer upon him her deserted friend Harriet Smith. Harriet has, in the interim, fallen desperately in love with Mr. Knightley, the sturdy, advice-giving bachelor; and, as all the village supposes Frank Churchill and Emma to be attached to each other, there are cross purposes enough (were the novel of a more romantic cast) for cutting half the men's throats and breaking all the women's hearts. But at Highbury Cupid walks decorously, and with good discretion, bearing his torch under a lantern instead of flourishing it around to set the house on fire. All these entanglements bring on only a train of mistakes and embarrassing situations, and dialogues at balls and parties of pleasure, in which the author displays her peculiar powers of humor and knowledge of human life. The plot is extricated with great simplicity. The aunt of Frank Churchill dies; his uncle, no longer under her baneful influence, consents to his marriage with Jane Fairfax. Mr. Knightley and Emma are led, by this unexpected incident, to discover that they had been in love with each other all along. Mr. Woodhouse's objections to the marriage of his daughter are overpowered by the fears of house-breakers, and the comfort which he hopes to derive from having a stout son-in-law resident in the family; and the facile affections of Harriet Smith are transferred, like a bank bill by endorsation, to her former suitor, the honest farmer, who had obtained a favorable opportunity

of renewing his addresses. Such is the simple plan of a story which we peruse with pleasure, if not with deep interest, and which perhaps we might more willingly resume than one of those narratives where the attention is strongly riveted, during the first perusal, by the powerful excitement of curiosity.

The author's knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize, reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader.*

DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE AUTHOR OF "WAVERLEY” AND CAPTAIN CLUTTERBUCK

WALTER SCOTT

[Scott had playfully prefaced the romance of The Monastery, 1820, with an epistle supposed to be written by Captain Cuthbert Clutterbuck of Kennaquhair, who was represented as having furnished the author of Waverley the materials of the story in an ancient manuscript. The Fortunes of Nigel, 1822, was prefaced by a letter from Captain Clutterbuck to Dr. Dryasdust, in which the writer related how he had lately met the Author of Waverley for the first time in a remote room in an Edinburgh publishing house, and engaged in the following dialogue. It should be recalled that at the time these books were published the authorship of the Waverley Novels was still a secret.]

Author. I was willing to see you, Captain Clutterbuck, being the person of my family whom I have most regard for, since the death of Jedediah Cleishbotham;1 and I am afraid I may have done you some wrong, in assigning to you The Monastery as a portion of my effects. I have some thoughts of making it up to you by naming

In the paragraphs that follow, Scott quotes a specimen of Miss Austen's dialogue, praising its fidelity to real life, but querying whether, in the case of tedious characters, such fidelity may not itself become tedious.

The imaginary compiler of Scott's Tales of My Landlord.

you godfather to this yet unborn babe. But first, touching The Monastery,-how says the world?—you are abroad and can learn.

Captain. Hem! Hem!-the inquiry is delicate. I have not heard any complaints from the publishers.

Author. That is the principal matter; but yet an indifferent work is sometimes towed on by those which have left harbor before it, with the breeze in their poop. What say the critics?

Captain. There is a general-feeling-that the White Lady is no favorite.

Author. I think she is a failure myself, but rather in execution than conception. Could I have evoked an esprit follet, at the same time fantastic and interesting, capricious and kind-a sort of wildfire of the elements, bound by no fixed laws or motives of action-faithful and fond, yet teasing and uncertain

Captain. If you will pardon the interruption, sir, I think you are describing a pretty woman.

Author. On my word, I believe I am. I must invest my elementary spirits with a little human flesh and blood -they are too fine-drawn for the present taste of the public.

Captain. They object, too, that the object of your Nixie ought to have been more uniformly noble. Her ducking the priest 3 was no Naiad-like amusement.

Author. Ah! they ought to allow for the capriccios of what is, after all, but a better sort of goblin. The bath into which Ariel, the most delicate creation of Shakespeare's imagination, seduces our jolly friend Trinculo,⭑ was not of amber or rose-water. But no one shall find me rowing against the stream. I care not who knows it -I write for general amusement; and, though I never will aim at popularity by what I think unworthy means. I will not, on the other hand, be pertinaceous in the defence of my own errors against the voice of the public.

Captain. You abandon, then, in the present work, the mystic, and the magical, and the whole system of signs,

Elfin Sprite.

See The Tempest, IV. i. 181-84

See The Monastery, chapter v.

wonders, and omens? There are no dreams, or presages, or obscure allusions to future events?

Author. Not a Cock Lane scratch, my son-not one bounce on the drum of Tedworth 5-not so much as the poor tick of a solitary death-watch in the wainscot. All is clear and above board-a Scots metaphysician might believe every word of it.

Captain. And the story is, I hope, natural and probable; commencing strikingly, proceeding naturally, ending happily-like the course of a famed river, which gushes from the mouth of some obscure and romantic grotto, then gliding on, never pausing, never precipitating its course, visiting, as it were, by natural instinct, whatever worthy subjects of interest are presented by the country through which it passes-widening and deepening in interest as it flows on; and at length arriving at the final catastrophe as at some mighty haven, where ships of all kinds strike sail and yard?

6

Author. Hey! hey! what the deuce is all this? Why, 'tis 'Ercles' vein, and it would require some one much more like Hercules than I to produce a story which should gush, and glide, and never pause, and visit, and widen, and deepen, and all the rest on't. I should be chin-deep in the grave, man, before I had done with my task; and, in the meanwhile, all the quirks and quiddities which I might have devised for my reader's amusement would lie rotting in my gizzard, like Sancho's suppressed witticisms when he was under his master's displeasure.7 There was never a novel written on this plan while the world stood.

Captain. Pardon me-Tom Jones.

Author. True, and perhaps Amelia also. Fielding had high notions of the dignity of an art which he may be considered as having founded. He challenges a comparison between the Novel and the Epic. Smollett, Le Sage, and others, emancipating themselves from the strict

At Cock Lane, in Dr. Johnson's time, there was supposed to be a notable ghost. In 1661 a drummer of Tedworth was supposed to have employed agencies of the devil to persecute an enemy by means of mysterious noises in his house.

See Midsummer Night's Dream, I, ii, 42.

In Don Quixote, passim.

See Fielding's Preface to Joseph Andrews.

ness of the rules he has laid down, have written rather a history of the miscellaneous adventures which befall an individual in the course of life, than the plot of a regular and connected epopeia, where every step brings us a point nearer to the final catastrophe. These great masters have been satisfied if they amused the reader upon the road, though the conclusion only arrived because the tale must have an end-just as the traveler alights at the inn because it is evening.

Captain. A very commodious mode of traveling, for the author at least. In short, sir, you are of opinion with Bayes-"What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in fine things?" 9

Author. Grant that I were so, and that I should write with sense and spirit a few scenes, unlabored and loosely put together, but which had sufficient interest in them to amuse in one corner the pain of body; in another, to relieve anxiety of mind; in a third place, to unwrinkle a brow bent with the furrows of daily toil; in another, to fill the place of bad thoughts, or to suggest better; in yet another, to induce an idler to study the history of his country; in all, save where the perusal interrupted the discharge of serious duties, to furnish harmless amusement-might not the author of such a work, however inartificially executed, plead for his errors and negligences the excuse of the slave who, about to be punished for having spread the false report of a victory, saved himself by exclaiming, "Am I to blame, O Athenians, who have given you one happy day?"

Captain. But allowing, my dear sir, that you care not for your personal reputation, or for that of any literary person upon whose shoulders your faults may be visited, allow me to say that common gratitude to the public, which has received you so kindly, and to the critics, who have treated you so leniently, ought to induce you to bestow more pains on your story.

Author. I do entreat you, my son, as Dr. Johnson would have said, "free your mind from cant." For the critics, they have their business, and I mine; as the nursery proverb goes

In Buckingham's Rehearsal, III, i.