But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which it would be
long to perscribe--descriptive faculty, humour, pathos, half a dozen
other things of the highest importance in themselves, but of less
special application) was that which enabled him to discover and apply
something like a universal novel _language_. He did this, not as
Shakespeare did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante to
some extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by making a really
universal language which fits all times and persons because it is
universal like its creator's soul. Still less did he do it by adopting
the method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybody
else has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:--that is to say by
constructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method was nearer to this
latter. For historical creations (the most important of his
non-historic, _Guy Mannering_ and the _Antiquary_, were so near his own
time that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to
a period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint by
actual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary,
literature, where he could get it. He has done this so consummately that
perhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us as
artificial is the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be
"up-to-date"--_St. Ronan's Well_.

This question of "Lingo," on the other hand, was Miss Austen's weakest
point: and we have seen and shall see that it continued to be a weak
point with others. Some admirers have defended her even here: but proud
as I am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of the
order of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length. She very nearly
succeeded, and sometimes she did quite: but not always. The easy
dialogue and phrase that we find as early as Horace Walpole, even as
Chesterfield and Lady Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days,