patience with them.  Kent is the only place for happiness; everybody is rich there.”  Her novels do not introduce us to the most exalted levels of the aristocracy.  They provide us, however, with a natural history of county people and of people who are just below the level of county people and live in the eager hope of being taken notice of by them.  There is more caste snobbishness, I think, in Jane Austen’s novels than in any other fiction of equal genius.  She, far more than Thackeray, is the novelist of snobs.

How far Jane Austen herself shared the social prejudices of her characters it is not easy to say.  Unquestionably, she satirized them.  At the same time, she imputes the sense of superior rank not only to her butts, but to her heroes and heroines, as no other novelist has ever done.  Emma Woodhouse lamented the deficiency of this sense in Frank Churchill.  “His indifference to a confusion of rank,” she thought, “bordered too much on inelegance of mind.”  Mr. Darcy, again, even when he melts so far as to become an avowed lover, neither forgets his social position, nor omits to talk about it.  “His sense of her inferiority, of its being a degradation ... was dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.”  On discovering, to his amazement, that Elizabeth is offended rather than overwhelmed by his condescension, he defends himself warmly.  “Disguise of every sort,” he declares, “is my abhorrence.  Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related.  They were natural and just.  Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections?  To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”

It is perfectly true that Darcy and Emma Woodhouse are the butts of Miss Austen as well as being among her heroes and heroines.  She mocks them—­Darcy especially—­no less than she admires.  She loves to let her wit play about the egoism of social caste.  She is quite merciless in deriding, it when it becomes overbearing, as in Lady Catherine de Bourgh, or when it produces flunkeyish reactions, as in Mr. Collins.  But I fancy she liked a modest measure of it.  Most people do.  Jane Austen, in writing so much about the sense of family and position, chose as her theme one of the most widespread passions of civilized human nature.

She was herself a clergyman’s daughter.  She was the seventh of a family of eight, born in the parsonage at Steventon, in Hampshire.  Her life seems to have been far from exciting.  Her father, like the clergy in her novels, was a man of leisure—­of so much leisure, as Mr. Cornish reminds us, that he was able to read out Cowper to his family in the mornings.  Jane was brought up to be a young lady of leisure.  She learned French and Italian and sewing:  she was “especially great in satin-stitch.”  She excelled at the game of spillikins.