with Prince Leopold, that “an historical romance, illustrative of the august House of Coburg, would just now be very interesting,” she answered:—­“I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe-Coburg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in.  But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem.  I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable to keep it up, and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure that I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.  No!  I must keep to my own style, and go on in my own way:  and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I shall totally fail in any other.”  And again she writes:  “What shall I do with your ’strong, manly, vigorous sketches, full of variety and glow’?  How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect, after much labor?”

Miss Austen read very little.  She “detested quartos.”  Richardson, Johnson, Crabbe, and Cowper seem to have been the only authors for whom she had an appreciation.  She would sometimes say, in jest, that “if ever she married at all, she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe!” But her bent of original composition, her amazing power of observation, her inexhaustible sense of humor, her absorbing interest in what she saw about her, were so strong that she needed no reinforcement of culture.  It was no more in her power than it was in Wordsworth’s to “gather a posy of other men’s thoughts.”

During her lifetime she had not a single literary friend.  Other women novelists possessed their sponsors and devotees.  Miss Ferrier was the delight of a brilliant Edinboro’ coterie.  Miss Edgeworth was feasted and flattered, not only in England, but on the Continent; Miss Burney counted Johnson, Burke, Garrick, Windham, Sheridan, among the admiring friends who assured her that no flight in fiction or the drama was beyond her powers.  But the creator of Elizabeth Bennet, of Emma, and of Mr. Collins, never met an author of eminence, received no encouragement to write except that of her own family, heard no literary talk, and obtained in her lifetime but the slightest literary recognition.  It was long after her death that Walter Scott wrote in his journal:—­“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 commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me.”