ooke and Felix Holt. If Felix Holt is quite as much a
working-man as Adam Bede, occupying a social position higher in no respect
whatever, yet he is a workingman of a far different type. If Adam is the
nobler character, the truer type of man, Felix represents a larger social
purpose and has higher moral aims. In _Adam Bede_, we find rustic
simplicity and contentment, but in _Felix Holt_ we touch social aspirations
and political ambitions. The horizon has widened, the plane of social life
has lifted, there are new motives and larger ideals.

Very many of her readers and critics regard _Middlemarch_ as George Eliot's
greatest novel. This is said to have been her own opinion. With great
unanimity her readers pronounce _Felix Holt_ her weakest and least
interesting work. So far as the dramatic and artistic execution are
concerned, these judgments are not entirely correct. The machinery of
_Middlemarch_ is clumsy, and the plot desultory in aim and method. On the
other hand, _Felix Holt_ is strongly thought out and skilfully planned. It
has much of passion and enthusiasm in it, and not a little of pure and
noble sentiment, while _Middlemarch_ is never impassioned, but flows on
calmly. The author evidently put herself into _Felix Holt_ with the purpose
of teaching her own views about moral and social life. She lived in the
characters, felt and hoped with them, and wrote out of a deep, spontaneous
purpose. The sensational element has been more fully used, and the unity of
the plot more thoroughly developed, than in any other of her works, while
there is a living, breathing purpose in the story which is absent from her
later works. _Felix Holt_ is one of the two or three novels by George Eliot
which have an affirmative and thoroughly constructive purpose. It is this
purpose which makes the chief interest of the work. It is a story of social
reform, and is to be read as an embodiment of the author's political ideas.
From this point of view it is a story full of interest, and it is the one
of George Eliot's novels which will most strongly impress those who are
fully in sympathy with her ideas of progress and social regeneration. The
purpose of _Middlemarch_ is critical, to show how our modern social life
cramps the individual, limits his energies, and destroys his power of
helpful service to the world. This critical aim runs through the whole work
and colors every feature of it. The impression made by the whole work is
saddening; an