But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which it would be long to perscribe—­descriptive faculty, humour, pathos, half a dozen other things of the highest importance in themselves, but of less special application) was that which enabled him to discover and apply something like a universal novel language.  He did this, not as Shakespeare did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante to some extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by making a really universal language which fits all times and persons because it is universal like its creator’s soul.  Still less did he do it by adopting the method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybody else has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:—­that is to say by constructing a mosaic of his own.  But his own method was nearer to this latter.  For historical creations (the most important of his non-historic, Guy Mannering and the Antiquary, were so near his own time that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to a period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint by actual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary, literature, where he could get it.  He has done this so consummately that perhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us as artificial is the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be “up-to-date”—­St. Ronan’s Well.

This question of “Lingo,” on the other hand, was Miss Austen’s weakest point:  and we have seen and shall see that it continued to be a weak point with others.  Some admirers have defended her even here:  but proud as I am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of the order of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length.  She very nearly succeeded, and sometimes she did quite:  but not always.  The easy dialogue and phrase that we find as early as Horace Walpole, even as Chesterfield and Lady Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days, appears in Fanny Burney’s diaries but not in the novels, does not seem always within Miss Austen’s grasp.  But her advance in this respect is enormous:  she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in St. Ronan’s Well:  and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged in unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarely goes even a hair’s-breadth wrong.  In almost every other respect she does not go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair.  The story is the least part with her:  but her stories are always miraculously adequate:  neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with the minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quite indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to a few who are not quite of negligible judgment.  But the reason of this adequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph.  Not being a poet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poetic phrase: