moment, and released Captain Wentworth as well as herself. He continued at the window, and after calmly and politely saying,' I hope the little boy is better,' was silent. She was obliged to kneel by the sofa, and remain there to satisfy her patient, and thus they continued a few minutes, when, to her very great satisfaction, she heard some other person crossing the vestibule. It proved to be Charles Hayter," who supposes Wentworth to be his rival for one of the Miss Musgroves. He seats himself, and takes up a newspaper, ignoring Wentworth's willingness to talk. " Another minute brought another addition. The younger boy, a remarkably stout, forward child of two years old, having got the door opened, made his determined appearance among them, and went straight to the sofa to see what was going on, and put in his claim to anything good that might be given away. There being nothing to eat, he could only have some play, and as his aunt would not let him tease his sick brother, he began to fasten himself upon her, as she knelt, in a way that, busy as she was about Charles, she could not shake him off. She spoke to him, ordered, insisted, and entreated in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly. 'Walter', said she, 'get down this moment. You are extremely troublesome. I am very angry with you.' 'Walter,' cried Charles Hayter, ' why do you not do as you are bid? . . . Come to me, Walter.' But not a bit did Walter stir. In another moment she found herself in the state of being released from him; someone was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much that his sturdy little hands were unfastened from around her neck and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it. . . . She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles with most disordered feelings . . . with the conviction soon forced upon her by the noise he was studiously making with the child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks . . . till enabled by the entrance of Mary and the Miss Musgroves to make over her patient to their care and leave the room. She could not stay. . . . She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, and of being overcome by such a trifle; but so it was, and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her. "
III
As any practiced reader of fiction could easily demonstrate, this is not the sort of rescue to bring about a reconciliation between lovers in a true novel. There it must be something more formidable than a naughty little boy that the heroine is saved from: it must be a deadly miscreant, or a mad bull, or a frightened horse, or an express train, or a sinking ship. Still it cannot be denied that this simple, this homely scene, is very pretty, and is very like things that happen in life, where there is reason to think love is oftener shown in quality than quantity, and does its effect, as perfectly in the little as in the great events. Even the most tremendous incident of the book, the famous passage which made Tennyson, when he visited Lyme Regis, wish to see first of all the place where Louisa Musgrove fell from the Cobb, has hardly heroic proportions, though it is of greater intensity in its lifelikeness, and it reverses the relations of Anne and Wentworth in the characters of helper and helped.
" There was too much wind to make the high part of the new Cobb pleasant for the ladies, and they agreed to get down the steps to the lower, and all were contented to pass quietly and safely down the steep steps excepting Louisa; she must be jumped down them by Captain Wentworth. . . . She was safely down, and instantly to shew her enjoyment, ran up the steps to be jumped down again. He advised her against it, thought the jar too great; but no, he reasoned and talked in vain, she smiled and said, ' I am determined I will': he put out his hands; she was too precipitate by half a second; she fell on the pavement on the Lower Cobb, and was taken up lifeless! There was no wound, no visible bruise; but her eyes were closed, she breathed not, her face was like death. . . . Captain Wentworth, who had caught her up, knelt with her in his arms, looking on her with a face as pallid as her own in an agony of silence. 'She is dead!' screamed Mary, catching hold of her husband, and contributing with her own horror to make him immovable; and in the same moment, Henrietta, sinking under the conviction, lost her senses, too, and would have fallen on the steps, but for Captain Benwick and Anne, who supported her between them. ' Is there no one to help me?' were the first words that burst from Captain Wentworth. 'Go to him; go to him', cried Anne;' for Heaven's sake, go to him. Leave me and go to him. Rub her hands, rub her temples; here are salts; take them, take them. ' Louisa was raised up and supported between them. Everything was done that Anne had prompted, but in vain; while Captain Wentworth, staggering against the wall for his support, exclaimed in the bitterest agony, 'Oh, God! Her father and mother!' 'A surgeon!' said Anne. He caught at the word; it seemed to rouse him at once; and saying only, 'True, true; a surgeon this instant.' . . . Anne, attending with all the strength and zeal and thought, which instinct supplied, to Henrietta, still tried, at intervals, to suggest comfort to the others, tried to quiet Maty, to animate Charles, to assuage the feelings of Captain Wentworth. Both seemed to look to her for direction. 'Anne, Anne,' cried Charles, 'what in Heaven's name is to be done next?' Captain Wentworth's eyes were also turned towards her. ' Had she not better be carried to the inn? Yes, I am sure; carry her to the inn.' 'Yes, yes, to the inn,' repeated Wentworth. . . . ' I will carry her myself."'
Anne has to show, with all this presence of mind, a greatness of mind superior to the misery of imagining that Wentworth is in love with Louisa, and that his impassioned remorse is an expression of his love. Only when they are going home together, to tell Louisa's parents of the accident, does she make one meek little tacit reflection in her own behalf. "'Don't talk of it, don't talk of it,' he cried. 'Oh, God, that I had not given way to her at that fatal moment! Had I done as 1 ought! But so eager and so resolute! Dear, sweet Louisa!' Anne wondered whether it ever occurred to him now to question the justness of his own previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantage of firmness of character. . . . She thought it could scarcely escape him to feel that a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favor of happiness as a very resolute character."
IV
One of the things that Jane Austen was first in was the personal description of her heroines. Almost to her time the appearance of the different characters was left to the reader's imagination; it is only in the modern novel that the author seems to feel it his duty to tell how his people look. We have seen how meagerly and formally the heroines of " The Vicar of Wakefield " are presented. In "Sir Charles Grandison," there is a great pretense of describing the beauty of Harriet Byron, but the image given is vague and conventional. So far as I recall them, the looks of Fanny Burney's and Maria Edgeworth's heroines are left to the reader's liking; and I do not remember any portrait even of Elizabeth Bennet in " Pride and Prejudice." It is in her later stories that Jane Austen offers this proof of modernity among so many other proofs of it, and tells us how her girls appeared to her. She tells us not very elaborately, to be sure, though in the case of Emma Woodhouse, in "Emma," the picture is quite finished. In" Persuasion" Anne Eliot is slightly sketched; and we must be content with the fact that she had " mild dark eyes and delicate features," and that at the time we are introduced to her she fully looked her twenty-seven years. But this is a good deal better than nothing, and in "Northanger Abbey" Catharine Morland is still more tangibly presented. " The Morlands . . . were in general very plain, and Catharine was, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin, awkward figure, a sallow skin without color, dark lank hair, and strong features. ... At fifteen, appearances were mending. . . . Her complexion improved, her features were softened by plumpness and color, her eyes gained more animation, and her figure more consequence." At seventeen, when we make her acquaintance, her manners were " just removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl; her person pleasing, and when in good looks, pretty."
These particulars are from that delightful first chapter where the character as well as the person of the heroine is studied with the playful irony in which the whole story is conceived. From the beginning we know that it is a comedy the author has in hand; and we lose sight of her obvious purpose of satirizing the Radcliffe school of romance in our delight with the character of the heroine and her adventures in Bath and at Northanger Abbey. Catharine Morland is a goose, but a very engaging goose, and a goose you must respect for her sincerity, her high principles, her generous trust of others, and her patience under trials that would be great for much stronger heads.
