Miss Austen is likewise the best of midnight friends. There stand her novels, few in number and shabby with much handling, and the god Hermes smiles upon them kindly. We have known them well for years. There is no fresh nook to be explored, no forgotten page to be revisited. But we will take one down, and re-read for the fiftieth time the history of the theatricals at Mansfield Park; and see Mr. Yates ranting by himself in the dining-room, and the indefatigable lovers rehearsing amorously on the stage, and poor Mr. Rushworth stumbling through his two-and-forty speeches, and Fanny Price, in the chilly little schoolroom, listening disconsolately as her cousin Edmund and Mary Crawford go through their parts with more spirit and animation than the occasion seems to demand. When Sir Thomas returns, most inopportunely, from Antigua, we lay down the book with a sigh of gentle satisfaction, knowing that we shall find all these people in the morning just where they belong, and not, after the fashion of some modern novels, spirited overnight to the antipodes, with a breakneck gap of months or years to be spanned by our drooping imaginations. Sir Walter Scott tells us, with tacit approbation, of an old lady who always had Sir Charles Grandison read to her when she felt drowsy; because, should she fall asleep and waken up again, she would lose nothing of the story, but would find the characters just where she had left them, “conversing in the cedar-parlour.” It would be possible to take a refreshing nap--did our sympathy allow us such an alleviation--while Clarissa Harlowe is writing, on some tiny scraps of hidden paper, letters which fill a dozen printed pages.
Lovers of George Borrow are wont to claim that he is one of the choicest of bedside comrades. Mr. Birrell, indeed, stoutly maintains that slumber, healthy and calm, follows the reading of his books just as it follows a brisk walk or rattling drive. “A single chapter of Borrow is air and exercise.” Neither need we be very wide awake when we skim over his pages. He can be read with half-closed eyes, and we feel his stir and animation pleasantly from without, just as we feel the motion of a carriage when we are heavy with sleep. Peacock is too clever, and his cleverness has too much meaning and emphasis for this lazy delight. Yet, nevertheless, “The Misfortunes of Elphin” is an engaging book to re-read--if one knows it well already--in moments of drowsy satisfaction. Then will the convivial humor of “Seithenyn ap Seithyn” awake a sympathetic echo in our hearts, shorn for the nonce of all moral responsibility. Then will the roar of the ocean surging through the rotten dikes make the warm chimney corner doubly grateful. Then is the reader pleased to follow the fortunes of the uncrowned prince among a people who, having “no pamphleteering societies to demonstrate that reading and writing are better than meat and drink,” lived without political science, and lost themselves contentedly “in the grossness of beef and ale.” Peacock, moreover, in spite of his keenness and virility, is easily forgotten. We can “read him new,” and double our enjoyment. His characters seldom have any substantiality. We remember the talk, but not the talkers, and so go blithely back to those scenes of glad good-fellowship, to that admirable conservatism and that caustic wit.