Thus she who laughed at everybody else laughed at herself, and set her
critical instinct to estimate her own capacity. To Mr. Clarke, the
librarian of Carlton House, who had requested her to "delineate a
clergyman" of earnestness, enthusiasm, and learning, she replied:--"I am
quite honored by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman as
you gave the sketch of in your note. But I assure you I am not. The
comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the
enthusiastic, the literary.... I think I may boast myself to be, with
all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever
dared to be an authoress." And when the same remarkable bibliophile
suggested to her, on the approach of the marriage of the Princess
Charlotte 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,