The personal history of Jane Austen belongs to the close of the last and the beginning of the present century.  Her father through forty years was rector of a parish in the South of England.  Mr. Austen was a man of great taste in all literary matters; from him his daughter inherited many of her gifts.  He probably guided her early education and influenced the direction of her genius.  Her life was passed chiefly in the country.  Bath, then a fashionable watering-place, with occasional glimpses of London, must have afforded all the intercourse which she held with what is called “the world.”  Her travels were limited to excursions in the vicinity of her father’s residence.  Those were days of post-chaises and sedan-chairs, when the rush of the locomotive was unknown.  Steam, that genie of the vapor, was yet a little household elf, singing pleasant times by the evening fire, at quiet hearthstones; it has since expanded into a mighty giant, whose influences are no longer domestic.  The circles of fashion are changed also.  Those were the days of country-dances and India muslins; the beaux and belles of “the upper rooms” at Bath knew not the whirl of the waltz, nor the ceaseless involvements of “the German.”  Yet the measures of love and jealousy, of hope and fear, to which their hearts beat time, would be recognized to-night in every ballroom.  Infinite sameness, infinite variety, are not more apparent in the outward than in the inward world, and the work of that writer will alone be lasting who recognizes and embodies this eternal law of the great Author.

Jane Austen possessed in a remarkable degree this rare intuition.  The following passage is found in Sir Walter Scott’s journal, under date of the fourteenth of March, 1826:—­“Read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s finely written novel of ‘Pride and Prejudice.’  That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with.  The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me.”  This is high praise, but it is something more when we recur to the time at which Sir Walter writes this paragraph.  It is amid the dreary entries in his journal of 1826, many of which make our hearts ache and our eyes overflow.  He read the pages of Jane Austen on the fourteenth of March, and on the fifteenth he writes, “This morning I leave 39 Castle Street for the last time.”  It was something to have written a book sought for by him at such a moment.  Even at Malta, in December, 1831, when the pressure of disease, as well as of misfortune, was upon him, Sir Walter was often found with a volume of Miss Austen in his hand, and said to a friend, “There is a finishing-off in some of her scenes that is really quite above everybody else.”