'Lay down on the sofa, reading Miss Austen's "Mansfield Park"... The novel, I think, has the prevailing fault of the pleasant authoress's books; it deals too much in descriptions of the various states of mind, into which her characters are thrown, and amplifies into a page a search for motives which a stroke of the pen might give with greater power and interest. Is Richardson her model? She is an excellent portrait painter, she catches a man near to the life.'