named rather than Shakspere when wishing to compliment her by a comparison; with her manner of representation and her view of life in mind, one reverts to Meredith’s acute description of the spirit that inheres in true comedy.  “That slim, feasting smile, shaped like the longbow, was once a big round satyr’s laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder.  The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity.  Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any flattering eagerness.  Men’s future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they were out of proportion, overthrown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually or in the bulk—­the Spirit overhead will look humanly malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter.  That is the Comic Spirit.”

If the “silvery laughter” betimes sounds a bit sharp and thinly feminine, what would you have?  Even genius must be subject to the defect of its quality.  Still, it must be confessed that this attitude of the artist observer is broken in upon a little in the later novels, beginning with “Mansfield Park,” by a growing tendency to moral on the time, a tendency that points ominously to didacticism.  There is something of the difference in Jane Austen between early and late, that we shall afterwards meet in that other great woman novelist, George Eliot.  One might push the point too far, but it is fair to make it.

We may also inquire—­trying to see the thing freshly, with independence, and to get away from the mere handing-on of a traditional opinion—­if Jane Austen’s character-drawing, so far-famed for its truth, does not at times o’erstep the modesty of Nature.  Goldwin Smith, in his biography of her, is quite right in pointing out that she unquestionably overdraws her types:  Mr. Collins is at moments almost a reminder of Uriah Heap for oily submissiveness:  Sir Walter Eliot’s conceit goes so far he seems a theory more than a man, a “humor” in the Ben Jonson sense.  So, too, the valetudinarianism of Mr. Wood-house, like that of Smollett’s Bramble, is something strained; so is Lady de Bourgh’s pride and General Tilney’s tyranny.  Critics are fond of violent contrasts and to set over against one another authors so unlike, for example, as Miss