But it has an elopement.

_Emma_, which has perhaps on the whole been the most general favourite, may challenge that position on one ground beyond all question, though possibly not on all.

It is the absolute triumph of that reliance on the strictly ordinary which has been indicated as Miss Austen's title to pre-eminence in the history of the novel.

Not an event, not a circumstance, not a detail, is carried out of "the daily round, the common task" of average English middle-class humanity, upper and lower.
Yet every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put _sub specie eternitatis_ by the sorcery of art.

Few things could be more terrible--nothing more tiresome--than to hear the garrulous Miss Bates talk in actual life; few things are more delightful than to read her speeches as they occur here.