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, appears in Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not seem always within Miss Austen's grasp.

But her advance in this respect is enormous: she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in _St.Ronan's Well_: and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged in unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarely goes even a hair's-breadth wrong.

In almost every other respect she does not go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair.

The story is the least part with her: but her stories are always miraculously _adequate_: neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with the minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quite indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to a few who are not quite of negligible judgment.