A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Character and Tastes 71
In those days German was no more thought of than Hindostanee,
as part of a lady’s education. In history she followed the old
guides––Goldsmith, Hume, and Robertson.° Critical enquiry into
the usually received statements of the old historians was scarcely
begun. The history of the early kings of Rome had not yet been
dissolved into legend. Historic characters lay before the reader’s
eyes in broad light or shade, not much broken up by details. The
virtues of King Henry VIII. were yet undiscovered, nor had much
light been thrown on the inconsistencies of Queen Elizabeth; the
one was held to be an unmitigated tyrant, and an embodied Blue
Beard; the other a perfect model of wisdom and policy. Jane,
when a girl, had strong political opinions, especially about the
affairs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was a
vehement defender of Charles I. and his grandmother Mary;° but I
think it was rather from an impulse of feeling than from any
enquiry into the evidences by which they must be condemned or
acquitted. As she grew up, the politics of the day occupied very
little of her attention, but she probably shared the feeling of
moderate Toryism which prevailed in her family. She was well
acquainted with the old periodicals from the ‘Spectator’ downwards.°
Her knowledge of Richardson’s works was such as no one
is likely again to acquire, now that the multitude and the merits of
our light literature have called off the attention of readers from
that great master. Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles
Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour, was
familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G.
were as well remembered as if they had been living friends.°
Amongst her favourite writers, Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse,
and Cowper in both, stood high.° It is well that the native good
taste of herself and of those with whom she lived, saved her from
the snare into which a sister novelist° had fallen, of imitating the
grandiloquent style of Johnson. She thoroughly enjoyed Crabbe;
perhaps on account of a certain resemblance to herself in minute
and highly finished detail; and would sometimes say, in jest, that,
if she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe;°
looking on the author quite as an abstract idea, and ignorant and
regardless what manner of man he might be. Scott’s poetry gave