With all our modern progress, our advances in science and our new audacity of thought, there is one fashion of our ancestors that seems unlikely ever to die out - the love of Jane Austen. Her characters lived at the time of Waterloo, and their speech and manners seem almost incredibly artificial and formal compared with those of today; but they have never lost the charm that springs from the keen wit of their creator, her detached comprehension of human nature, and the limpid clarity of her style.