"slow," think Miss Austen "prim" and "dreary." Yet, even could you
return among us, I scarcely believe that, speaking the language of
the hour, as you might, and versed in its habits, you would win the
general admiration. For how tame, madam, are your characters,
especially your favourite heroines! how limited the life which you
knew and described! how narrow the range of your incidents! how
correct your grammar!

As heroines, for example, you chose ladies like Emma, and Elizabeth,
and Catherine: women remarkable neither for the brilliance nor for
the degradation of their birth; women wrapped up in their own and
the parish's concerns, ignorant of evil, as it seems, and
unacquainted with vain yearnings and interesting doubts. Who can
engage his fancy with their match-makings and the conduct of their
affections, when so many daring and dazzling heroines approach and
solicit his regard?

Here are princesses dressed in white velvet stamped with golden
fleurs-de-lys --ladies with hearts of ice and lips of fire, who
count their roubles by the million, their lovers by the score, and
even their husbands, very often, in figures of some arithmetical
importance. With these are the immaculate daughters of itinerant
Italian musicians--maids whose souls are unsoiled amidst the
contaminations of our streets, and whose acquaintance with the art
of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Daedalus and Scopas, is the more
admirable, because entirely derived from loving study of the
inexpensive collections vended by the plaster-of-Paris man round the
corner. When such heroines are wooed by the nephews of Dukes, where
are your Emmas and Elizabeths? Your volumes neither excite nor
satisfy the curiosities provoked by that modern and scientific