Want of truth to nature in character and dialogue, extravagant and clumsy plotting, neglect of (indeed entire blindness to) historic colour, unreal and unobserved description--all these things might be raised to a height or sunk to a bathos in the work of the Minerva Press--but there was far too much of them in _all_ the novel work of these sixty or seventy years.
Although the facts and dates are well enough known, it is perhaps not always remembered that Miss Austen, while representing what may, using a rather objectionable and ambiguous word, be called a more "modern" style of novel than Scott's, began long before him and had almost finished her work before his really began.

If that wonderful Bath bookseller had not kept _Northanger Abbey_ in a drawer, instead of publishing it, it would have had nearly twenty years start of _Waverley_.

And it must be remembered that _Northanger Abbey_, though it is, perhaps, chiefly thought of as a parody-satire on the school of Mrs.Radcliffe, is, as these parody-satires have a habit of being, a great deal more.

If Catherine had not made a fool of herself about the _Orphan of the Black Forest_ and _Horrid Mysteries_ (or rather if everything relating to this were "blacked out" as by a Russian censor) there would still remain the admirable framework of her presentation at Bath and her intercourse with the Tilneys; the more admirable character-sketches of herself--the triumph of the ordinary made not ordinary--and the Thorpes; the most admirable flashes of satire and knowledge of human nature, not "promiscuous" or thrown out _apropos_ of things in general, but acting as assistants and invigorators to the story.
In the few words just used lies, as far as it can be comprehended in any few words, the secret both of Miss Austen and of Scott.

It has been said--more than once or twice, I fear--that hardly until Bunyan and Defoe do we get an interesting story--something that grasps us and carries us away with it--at all.