70 JANE AUSTEN 



surely have repented of his entanglement with 

 Catherine. There is, however, this to be said, that 

 I strongly suspect Elizabeth of being his first 

 cousin. She is so hke him that she might have 

 failed to please him, or he may have known her 

 from a little girl and looked on her as a sister. Or 

 the marriages of cousins may have been as im- 

 possible among the Tilneys as in the Royal Family 

 of Crim Tartary, where Bulbo's beautiful Circassian 

 cousin simply had to be allowed to die of love for 

 him. 



There are many possibiUties in the combination 

 of characters now separated by inexorable paper 

 and ink. One can imagine a meeting at Bath 

 between General Tilney and Sir Walter Elliott ; 

 they would clearly sympathise, and unless the 

 General has injured his complexion by incautious 

 zeal on active service, which seems unlikely, Sir 

 Walter would have had "no objection to being seen 

 with him anywhere" ; he might even have walked 

 arm-in-arm with him as he did with Colonel Wallis, 

 who "was a fine mihtary figure, though sandy 

 haired." Again, Mr. Collins would have been 

 charmed with Mr. Dashwood in Sense and Sensi- 

 bility, for although the two characters are not 

 quite similarly compounded of snobbery and folly, 

 yet there is a common substratum of meanness 

 that must have served as a bond. 



It would be interesting to treat the whole of 

 Miss Austen's characters as the flora of a given 

 land is dealt with, to divide them into genera and 

 species, and to provide an analytical key. Take, 

 for instance, the young men : these would corres- 



