unpins her
strings and throws them languidly backward--a touching gesture,
indicative, even in the deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry
moments when cap-strings will once more have a charm. As the tears
subside a little, and with her head leaning backward at an angle that
will not injure her bonnet, she endures that terrible moment when
grief, which has made all things else a weariness, has itself become
weary; she looks down pensively at her bracelets, and adjusts their
clasps with that pretty studied fortuity which would be gratifying to
her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy state. [Footnote:
Mill on the Floss, chapter VII.]

In her later books the strained efforts at satire are partially avoided,
and though the satirical spirit is not withdrawn in any measure, yet it is
more delicately managed. It is less open, less blunt, but hardly more
subtle and penetrative. It is still a strained effort, and it is quite too
hard and bare in statement. We are told in _Middlemarch_ that

Mrs. Bulstrode's _naive_ way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the
nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the
consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a
sufficient relief from the weight of her husband's invariable
seriousness.

Such a turning of sentiment into satire as the following is rather jarring,
and is a good specimen of that "laborious smartness," as Mr. R.H. Hutton
justly calls it, which is found in all of George Eliot's books:--

Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the
things whence its subtile interlacings are swung--are scarcely
perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from
blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and
lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs
and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life toward another, visions of
completeness, indefinite trust. And Lydgate fell to spinning that web
from his inward self with wonderful rapidity, in spite of experience
supposed to be finished off with the drama of Laure--in spite, too, of
medicine and biology; for the inspection of macerated muscle or of eyes
presented in a dish (like Santa Lucia's), and other incidents of
scientific inquiry, are observed to be less incompatible with poetic
love than a