es with exquisite Junonine
tenderness by giving her a little boy in the bride-chamber of the home
of the clever young politician whom the local editor has called a
"violent energumen."

* * * * *

In laying down the book the reader is conscious of a different feeling
from that with which he ordinarily parts with a work of fiction which
has gratified his artistic tastes and furnished him with a high
intellectual pleasure. Comparing the productions of George Eliot with
those of other novelists, we are tempted to think of these as trivial
fond records, which might well be blotted from the tablets of the
memory, leaving the inscription she has placed there to live alone in
ineffaceable characters. It is not that they show her to be endowed with
a larger measure of those gifts which constitute the artist. In each of
these she has perhaps been equaled or surpassed by one or another of her
predecessors. As a painter of manners, of all that belongs to the
surface of life, she is rivaled in fidelity, if not in breadth and
force, by Fielding, Thackeray and Miss Austen. Her observation is less
keen than theirs, her portraiture less vivid, her humor less cordial and
abundant. Her conceptions have not the intensity of Charlotte Bronte's,
nor her great scenes the dramatic fire of Scott's. In the minor matters
of invention and plot she sometimes has recourse to shifts that betray
the deficiencies they are intended to conceal. The quality in which she
is supreme is one that lies beyond the strict domain of art. It is the
power of penetrating to the roots of human character and action--a power
which seems to be something more than insight, but for which sympathy
would be a still less adequate term, indicating as it does a nature
harmonious and complete, one in which intellect and feeling are resolved
into an element that overflows and envelops its object without effort or
repulsion. In other novelists we admire a subtlety that winds through
the intricacies of motives, unmasking deceptions, revealing weaknesses
and flaws but half suspected, or delicacies and beauties but half
appreciated: George Eliot drops a plummet that sinks straight and
steadily, through turbid waves and calm under-current, reaching depths
before unexplored. We can claim no part in her discoveries, however our
faculties may be exercised in grasping or in testing them. They more
often correct than confirm our impressions; they make larg