[31] Such was the style of travelling en grand seigneur last century.
[32] What a quaint, pretty picture the young man in his coachman’s great-coat, the girl in her riding-habit and straw bonnet, which she is soon so anxious to protect from the rain, would make, taken as she stepped in or stepped out of Henry’s “curricle!”
[33] Even a good clergyman measured his duties differently last century.
[34] Mrs. Radcliffe, who appears to have been unable to stand a joke on her romances, even from their admirers, and who was much hurt by a laughing reference of Sir Walter Scott’s in “Waverley,” would have looked aghast at this levity.
[35] Revived mediævalism in æsthetics has changed all this, and gone far to banish again the garish light of day from “modern antique” houses.
[36] My impression is that Jane Austen began “Northanger Abbey” with the simple intention of executing, in accordance with an early amusement of hers, a gay parody on romances in general, and on one romance in particular. But her genius proved too much for her; and though she never entirely lost sight of her original design, she departed so far from it, by prolonging the Bath portion of the tale, as to destroy its unity, and make somewhat of a jumble of the whole book. On the other hand, the exercise of her great gifts, in their proper field of real life and character-drawing, has produced for us, instead of a clever burlesque for the amusement of contemporaries, a disjointed work of genius for the edification and enjoyment of succeeding generations.
[37] What a candid admission from a heroine, or from any girl! But to love flowers was not obligatory last century.
[38] Withal, one must be struck by Catherine’s unworldly disinterestedness. She has given her love to a son of the house; but in place of taking the opportunity to ascertain and exult over the Tilneys’ wealth and position, she is occupied with foolish romancing on her own account.
[39] I am able to conjecture, by the help of my own early studies, that Jane Austen is not foreseeing, and casting mockery on some modern sensational novels in this passage. She is simply borrowing from, and holding up to ridicule, a leading incident in the once popular romance of “The Children of the Abbey,” by Elizabeth Helme.
[40] If Jane Austen be right—and she was a great judge of human nature—in the implication that an eager, enthusiastic young reader is impelled to reproduce in personal experience what he or she reads, and if modern sensational novels come to be lived by our young men and women, where shall we look—how shall we answer for the wrong done by our idiotic, noxious, light literature?