The chairs and tables, the beds and the basins--everything--can be made into novel-gold: and, when it has been made, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any other magician of the same class, as ever.

One of the most curious things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition in her.

Even her young men--certainly not her greatest successes--are by no means doubles of each other: and nature herself could not turn out half a dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated than Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, and finally the three sisters of _Persuasion_, the other (quite other) Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne.

The "ruts of the brain" in novelists are a by-word.

There are none here.
In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for the first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere.