Reading Austen

September 18 [1827].—Wrote five pages of the Tales [of a Grandfather]. Walked from Huntly Burn, having gone in the carriage. Smoked my cigar with Lockhart after dinner, and then whiled away the evening over one of Miss Austen's novels. There is a truth of painting in her writings which always delights me. They do not, it is true, get above the middle classes of society, but there she is inimitable.

Walter Scott enjoyed Jane Austen's novels, as this entry from his Journal indicates.  John Gibson Lockhart, in his "Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott" records being with Scott (1831), and his mentioning Miss Austen:

 '...Among some other talk, in returning, he [Scott] spoke with praise of Miss Ferrier as a novelist, and then with still higher praise of Miss Austen. Of the latter he said—" I find myself every now and then with one of her books in my hand. There's a finishing-off in some of her scenes that is really quite above everybody else...'

Jane Austen

"Also read again, for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me..."

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775. Austen read Scott, and Scott read Austen, as evidenced by the entry above, which is from Scott's Journal of March 14, 1826.