GEORGE ALLEN
PUBLISHER
LONDON
RUSKIN HOUSE
]
_Reading Jane's Letters._ _Chap 34._
]
PRIDE.
and
PREJUDICE
by
Jane Austen,
with a Preface by
George Saintsbury and
Illustrations by
Hugh Thomson
[Illustration: 1894]
Ruskin 156. Charing
House. Cross Road.
London
George Allen.
CHISWICK PRESS:--CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
_To J. Comyns Carr in acknowledgment of all I
owe to his friendship and advice, these illustrations are gratefully inscribed_
_Hugh Thomson_
]
PREFACE.
_Walt Whitman has somewhere a fine and just distinction between "loving by allowance" and "loving with personal love." This distinction applies to books as well as to men and women; and in the case of the not very numerous authors who are the objects of the personal affection, it brings a curious consequence with it. There is much more difference as to their best work than in the case of those others who are loved "by allowance" by convention, and because it is felt to be the right and proper thing to love them. And in the sect--fairly large and yet unusually choice--of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the novels. To some the delightful freshness and humour of_ Northanger
Abbey, _its completeness, finish, and_ entrain, _obscure the undoubted critical facts that its scale is small, and its sche…