It is a mere continuous narrative." Now, this was all changed.

It is doubtful whether if _Northanger Abbey_ had actually appeared in 1796 it would have been appreciated--Miss Austen, like other writers of genius, had, not exactly as the common but incorrect phrase goes, to create the taste for her own work, but to arouse the long dormant appetite which she was born to satisfy.

Yet, looking back a hundred years, it seems impossible that anybody of wits should have failed at once to discover the range, the perfection, and the variety of the new gift, or set of gifts.

Here all the elements come in: and something with them that enlivens and intensifies them all.

The plot is not intricate, but there is a plot--good deal more, perhaps, than is generally noticed, and more than Miss Austen herself sometimes gave, as, for instance, in _Mansfield Park_.