a plan which, so far as we know, he is justified in
calling new, and which leaves her life to write itself in extracts from
her letters and journals. With the least possible obtrusion from the
biographer, the original pieces are formed into a connected whole 'that
combines a narrative of day-to-day life with the play of light and shade
which only letters written in serious moods can give.' The idea is a
good one, and Mr. Cross deserves great credit for it. We may hope that
its success will encourage imitators. Certainly there are drawbacks. We
miss the animation of mixed narrative. There is, too, a touch of
monotony in listening for so long to the voice of a single speaker
addressing others who are silent behind a screen. But Mr. Cross could
not, we think, have devised a better way of dealing with his material:
it is simple, modest, and effective.

George Eliot, after all, led the life of a studious recluse, with none
of the bustle, variety, motion, and large communication with the outer
world, that justified Lockhart and Moore in making a long story of the
lives of Scott and Byron. Even here, among men of letters, who were also
men of action and of great sociability, are not all biographies too
long? Let any sensible reader turn to the shelf where his Lives repose;
we shall be surprised if he does not find that nearly every one of them,
taking the present century alone, and including such splendid and
attractive subjects as Goethe, Hume, Romilly, Mackintosh, Horner,
Chalmers, Arnold, Southey, Cowper, would not have been all the better
for judicious curtailment. Lockhart, who wrote the longest, wrote also
the shortest, the Life of Burns; and the shortest is the best, in spite
of defects which would only have been worse if the book had been bigger.
It is to be feared that, conscientious and honourable as his self-denial
has been, even Mr. Cross has not wholly resisted the natural and
besetting error of the biographer. Most people will think that the
hundred pages of the Italian tour (vol. ii.), and some other not very
remarkable impressions of travel, might as well or better have been left
out.

As a mere letter-writer, George Eliot will not rank among the famous
masters of what is usually considered especially a woman's art. She was
too busy in serious work to have leisure for that most delightful way of
wasting time. Besides that, she had by nature none of that fluency,
rapidity, abandonment, pleasant volubility, whic