Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters | Page 7

We are told that he
was committed to the charge of Mr. Austen when he was sent over to
England in 1761, and we shall see later that there was a reason for this
connexion; but a three-year-old boy is a curious charge for a bachelor,
and poor little George must have wanted a nurse rather than a tutor. In
any case, he came under Mrs. Austen's maternal care, who afterwards
mourned for his early death 'as if he had been a child of her own.'[12]
FOOTNOTES:
[4] History of Kent.
[5] For further particulars respecting the earlier Austens, we venture to
refer our readers to Chawton Manor and its Owners, chap. vii.
[6] This almost exclusive care of the old man for his eldest grandson
may possibly have been the model for the action of old Mr. Dashwood
at the beginning of Sense and Sensibility.
[7] We are allowed to quote freely from a manuscript History of the
Leigh Family of Adlestrop, written in 1788; some part of which
appeared in an article written by the Hon. Agnes Leigh and published
in the National Review for April 1907.
[8] Brother both of the Duke of Chandos and of Mrs. Leigh.
[9] Memoir, p. 5.
[10] The author of the Memoir remarks on the fact that the Leigh arms

were placed on the front of Balliol towards Broad Street, now pulled
down. He did not live to see the same arms occupy a similar place on
the new buildings at King's College, Cambridge, erected when his son
Augustus was Provost.
[11] The Perrots seem to have set great store by their armorial bearings:
at least we are told that two branches of them lived at Northleigh at the
same time in the eighteenth century, hardly on speaking terms with
each other, and that one cause of quarrel was a difference of opinion as
to whether the three 'pears'--which, in punning heraldry, formed a part
of their coat of arms--were to be silver or gold.
[12] In the absence of any information as to where George Hastings
died or was buried, it is at present impossible to be sure about the
details of this interesting tradition.
CHAPTER II
STEVENTON
1764-1785
Steventon is a small village tucked away among the Hampshire Downs,
about seven miles south of Basingstoke. It is now looked down upon at
close quarters by the South-Western Railway, but, at the time of which
we are writing, it was almost equidistant from two main roads: one
running from Basingstoke to Andover, which would be joined at Deane
Gate, the other from Basingstoke to Winchester, joined at Popham
Lane. Communication with London was maintained--at any rate, in
1800--by two coaches that ran each night through Deane Gate. It does
not appear, however, to have been by any means certain that an
unexpected traveller would get a place in either of them.[13]
The surrounding country is certainly not picturesque; it presents no
grand or extensive views: the features, however, being small rather than
plain.[14] It is, in fact, an undulating district whose hills have no
marked character, and the poverty of whose soil prevents the timber
from attaining a great size. We need not therefore be surprised to hear

that when Cassandra Leigh saw the place for the first time, just before
her marriage, she should think it very inferior to the valley of the
Thames at Henley. Yet the neighbourhood had its beauties of rustic
lanes and hidden nooks; and Steventon, from the fall of the ground and
the abundance of its timber, was one of the prettiest spots in it. The
Rectory had been of the most miserable description, but George Austen
improved it until it became a tolerably roomy and convenient habitation.
It stood 'in a shallow valley, surrounded by sloping meadows, well
sprinkled with elm-trees, at the end of a small village of cottages, each
well provided with a garden, scattered about prettily on either side of
the road. . . . North of the house, the road from Deane to Popham Lane
ran at a sufficient distance from the front to allow a carriage drive,
through turf and trees. On the south side, the ground rose gently and
was occupied by one of those old-fashioned[15] gardens in which
vegetables and flowers are combined, flanked and protected on the east
by one of the thatched mud walls common in that country, and
overshadowed by fine elms. Along the upper or southern side of the
garden ran a terrace of the finest turf, which must have been in the
writer's thoughts when she described Catherine Morland's childish
delight in "rolling down the green slope at the back of the house."
'But the chief beauty of Steventon consisted in its hedgerows. A
hedgerow in that country does not mean a thin