Although the facts and dates are well enough known, it is perhaps not always remembered that Miss Austen, while representing what may, using a rather objectionable and ambiguous word, be called a more “modern” style of novel than Scott’s, began long before him and had almost finished her work before his really began.  If that wonderful Bath bookseller had not kept Northanger Abbey in a drawer, instead of publishing it, it would have had nearly twenty years start of Waverley.  And it must be remembered that Northanger Abbey, though it is, perhaps, chiefly thought of as a parody-satire on the school of Mrs. Radcliffe, is, as these parody-satires have a habit of being, a great deal more.  If Catherine had not made a fool of herself about the Orphan of the Black Forest and Horrid Mysteries (or rather if everything relating to this were “blacked out” as by a Russian censor) there would still remain the admirable framework of her presentation at Bath and her intercourse with the Tilneys; the more admirable character-sketches of herself—­the triumph of the ordinary made not ordinary—­and the Thorpes; the most admirable flashes of satire and knowledge of human nature, not “promiscuous” or thrown out apropos of things in general, but acting as assistants and invigorators to the story.

In the few words just used lies, as far as it can be comprehended in any few words, the secret both of Miss Austen and of Scott.  It has been said—­more than once or twice, I fear—­that hardly until Bunyan and Defoe do we get an interesting story—­something that grasps us and carries us away with it—­at all.  Except in the great eighteenth-century Four the experience is not repeated, save in parts of Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth later—­it is simulated rather than actually brought about by the Terror-novel—­except in the eternal exception of Vathek—­for Maturin did not do his best work till much later.  The absence of it is mainly due to a concatenation of inabilities on the part of the writers.  They don’t know what they ought to do:  and in a certain sense it may even be said that they don’t know what they are doing.  In the worst examples surveyed in the last chapter, such as A Peep at Our Ancestors, this ignorance plumbs the abyss—­blocks of dull serious narrative, almost or quite without action, and occasional insertions of flat, insipid, and (to any one with a little knowledge) impossible conversation, forming their staple.  Of the better class of books, from the Female Quixote to Discipline, this cannot fairly be said:  but there is always something wanting.  Frequently, as in both the books just mentioned, the writer is too serious and too desirous to instruct.  Hardly ever is there a real projection of character, in the round and living—­only pale, sketchy “academies” that neither live, nor move, nor have any but a fitful and partial being.  The conversation is, perhaps, the worst feature of