SCENE III.—The curtain rises, and discovers Sir Edward Spangle reclined in an elegant attitude on a sofa fast asleep.
Enter Col. Elliott.
Col. E. My daughter is not here, I see. There lies Sir Edward. Shall I tell him the secret? No, he’ll certainly blab it. But he’s asleep, and won’t hear me;—so I’ll e’en venture. (Goes up to SIR EDWARD, whispers him, and exit.)
END OF THE FIRST ACT.
FINIS.
* * * * *
Her own mature opinion of the desirableness of such an early habit of composition is given in the following words of a niece:—
‘As I grew older, my aunt would talk to me more seriously of my reading and my amusements. I had taken early to writing verses and stories, and I am sorry to think how I troubled her with reading them. She was very kind about it, and always had some praise to bestow, but at last she warned me against spending too much time upon them. She said—how well I recollect it!—that she knew writing stories was a great amusement, and she thought a harmless one, though many people, she was aware, thought otherwise; but that at my age it would be bad for me to be much taken up with my own compositions. Later still—it was after she had gone to Winchester—she sent me a message to this effect, that if I would take her advice I should cease writing till I was sixteen; that she had herself often wished she had read more, and written less in the corresponding years of her own life.’ As this niece was only twelve years old at the time of her aunt’s death, these words seem to imply that the juvenile tales to which
I have referred had, some of them at least, been written in her childhood.
But between these childish effusions, and the composition of her living works, there intervened another stage of her progress, during which she produced some stories, not without merit, but which she never considered worthy of publication. During this preparatory period her mind seems to have been working in a very different direction from that into which it ultimately settled. Instead of presenting faithful copies of nature, these tales were generally burlesques, ridiculing the improbable events and exaggerated sentiments which she had met with in sundry silly romances. Something of this fancy is to be found in ‘Northanger Abbey,’ but she soon left it far behind in her subsequent course. It would seem as if she were first taking note of all the faults to be avoided, and curiously considering how she ought not to write before she attempted to put forth her strength in the right direction. The family have, rightly, I think, declined to let these early works be published. Mr. Shortreed observed very pithily of Walter Scott’s early rambles on the borders, ‘He was makin’ himsell a’ the time; but he didna ken, may be, what he was about till years had passed. At first he thought of little, I dare say, but the queerness and the fun.’ And so, in a humbler way, Jane Austen was ‘makin’ hersell,’ little thinking of future fame, but caring only for ‘the queerness and the