Cranford

British literature since Charles Lamb.’ I had been thinking of Elia
after re-reading the book, and I was pleased to find myself on the steps
of such a critic as Lord Houghton. One could imagine Mrs. Sarah Battle
and the poor relation dwelling in Cranford, and if Charles Lamb could
have liked anything that was not London, he too might have fancied the
place. Perhaps Miss Austen’s ladies may also have visited there, but I
feel less certainty about them, they belong to a different condition of
things, to a more lively love-making set of people, both younger in age
and older in generation than the Cranford ladies. Cranford is farther
removed from the world, and yet more attuned to its larger interests
than Meryton or Kellynch or Hartfield. Drumble, the great noisy
manufacturing town, is its metropolis, not Bath with its succession of
card parties and Assembly Rooms. At Cranford love is a memory rather
than a present emotion; the sentimental locks of hair have turned to
gray, the billet doux to yellow, like autumn leaves falling from the
Tree of Life, but there is more of real feeling in these few signs of
what was once, than in all the Misses Bennett’s youthful romances put