In her last illness the fidelity of her spirit is constantly shown, and her affection becomes more unreserved in its utterance. There is one letter wherein, after speaking of Cassandra, she says, in a phrase curiously suggestive of Thackeray: "As to what I owe her, and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, I can only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and more."
That she was by nature "meek and lowly," as one of her American adorers declares, I cannot believe, but if she preferred the spacious rooms and well-spread board of her brother's mansion to the common parlour and boiled mutton-and-turnips of her father's rectory, she did not grizzle over her state, nor did she allow her conscious superiority of intelligence to claim distinction in her home. One of the few glimpses (apart from { 29} her own writings) that we have of her in her family relations is when, in the closing year of her life, her illness having begun to weaken her body, she was obliged to lie down frequently during the day. There was only one sofa at Chawton Cottage, and although Mrs. Austen, in spite of the many ailments she had formerly complained of, was a tolerably healthy old lady, the stricken daughter made herself a couch by putting several chairs together, and declared that she preferred it to the sofa which her mother commonly occupied. Sofas, we must remember, were at least as rare then as oak-panelled walls are now. It was in those days that Cobbett regretted that the sofa had ever been introduced into his country, and he no doubt, according to his habit, held the Prime Minister responsible for the aid to effeminate indulgence of which his contemporary Cowper sang.
Jane's discontent with the comparative poverty of her surroundings was not translated into ill temper. There are many reasons for believing, and few indeed for doubting, that she tried to do her duty in that state of life to which she was born, and from which she was not destined to { 30} emerge into the more varied pleasures and pains of a larger world. What if, among those whom she trusted, she could not resist expressing the lively thoughts suggested to her acute wit by the acts or utterances of her friends. She was the pride of her family, and its sunshine, even if her rays were more akin to the sun as we know him on a fine spring day at home than as we seek him on the Côte d'Azur.