[45] Written in 1815-16.
[46] What a capital picture, of an amiable rich man’s bondage.
[47] Are old abbeys so common in Hampshire that Jane Austen should have made two of her country-houses abbeys?
[48] The habit, now gone out of fashion, of having grown-up parlour-boarders in schools, rendered them more like homes for young people of all ages.
[49] These old genial suppers have vanished, being crowded out of existence by late dinners, which are very different meals.
[50] We can, however, imagine Harriet’s showing that book, with lingering pride and pleasure, to her grandchildren.
[51] The more convivial habits of the period peep out here and there in Jane Austen’s novels.
[52] Disingenuous, mocking Emma!
[53] In reading Jane Austen’s novels one is carried back to the time when good playing on the piano, or “the instrument” as it is frequently called, was held, in the higher classes, as it is now in much lower grades, a crowning mark of a liberal education in a girl. Yet Jane Austen herself fell short of this attainment, and she almost invariably makes her heroines—as in the experiences of Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Catherine Morland, and Fanny Price—either to have failed in the duty of practising, so as not to have acquired more than a moderate proficiency in music, or else to have been deficient in musical taste or deprived of musical education.
[54] I have already said that Jane Austen wastes no time in descriptions of places; yet she often contrives to suggest so much in a few lines, that her pleasant, homely English scenes, no less than her life-like characters, rise vividly before the mind. That briefest description of Abbey Mill Farm—comfortable and tidy, with the short, straight walk between the apple-trees up to the front door—does its business thoroughly. I have seen more than one such cosy, trim, old-fashioned farmhouse, which has brought the exclamation to my lips, “That was where Harriet Smith visited the Martins.”