can need emphasising only to those on whom no emphasis would be likely
to impress it: but it may not be quite so evident at once that between
them they cover almost the entire possible ground of prose fiction. The
more striking and popular as well as more strictly novel style of Scott
naturally attracted most attention at first: indeed it can hardly be
said that, for the next thirty years, much attempt was made to follow in
Miss Austen's steps, while such attempts as were made were seldom very
good.[19] But there is no need to hurry Time: and he generally knows
what he is about. At any rate he had, in and through these two
provided--for generations, probably for centuries, to come--patterns and
principles for whoso would to follow in prose fiction.

[19] Some work of distinction, actually later than hers in date,
is older in kind. This is the case not only with the later books
of her Irish elder sister. Miss Edgeworth (see last chapter),
but with all those of her Scotch younger one, Miss Ferrier, who
wrote _Marriage_ just after _Sense and Sensibility_ appeared,
but did not publish it (1818) till after Miss Austen's death,
following it with _The Inheritance_ (1824) and _Destiny_ (1831).
Miss Ferrier, who had a strong though rather hard humour and
great faculty of pronounced character-drawing, is better at a
series of sketches than at a complete novel--only _The
Inheritance_ having much central unity. And there is still
eighteenth-century quality rather than nineteenth in her
alternations of Smollettian farce-satire and Mackenziefied
sentiment. She is very good to read, but stand a little out of
the regular historic succession, as well as out of the ordinary
novel classes.