ll the wealth,
beauty, and joy of his yet unshadowed love.

* * * * *

In the next of this series of great works, and the one which to many of
her readers is and will remain the most fascinating--'Middlemarch'--George
Eliot has stretched a broader and more crowded canvas, on which, however,
every figure, to the least important that appears, is--not sketched or
outlined, but--filled in with an intense and lifelike vividness and
precision that makes each stand out as if it stood there alone. Quote
but a few words from any one of the speakers, and we know in a moment who
that speaker is. And each is the type or representative of a class; we
have no monsters or unnatural creations among them. To a certain extent
all are idealised for good or for evil,--it cannot be otherwise in
fiction without its ceasing to be fiction; but the essential elements of
character and life in all are not peculiar to them, but broad and
universal as our humanity itself. Dorothea and her sister, Mr Brooke and
Sir James Chettam, Rosamond Vincy and her brother, Mr Vincy and his wife,
Casaubon and Lydgate, Farebrother and Ladislaw, Mary Garth and her
parents, Bulstrode and Raffles, even Drs Sprague and Minchin, old
Featherstone and his kindred--all are but representative men and women,
with whose prototypes every reader, if gifted with the subtle power of
penetration and analysis of George Eliot, might claim personal
acquaintance.

This richly-crowded canvas presents to us such variety of illustration of
the two great antagonistic principles of human life--self-pleasing and
self-abnegation, love of pleasure and the love of God more or less
absolute and consummate--that it is no easy task to select from among
them. But two figures stand out before us, each portrayed with such
finished yet unlaboured art--living, moving, talking before us--contrasted
with such exquisite yet unobtrusive delicacy, and so subtilely
illustrating the two great phases of human inspiration and life--that
which centres in self, and that which yearns and seeks to lose itself in
the infinite of truth, purity, and love--that instinctively and
irresistibly the mind fixes upon them. These are Dorothea and Rosamond
Vincy.

To not a few of George Eliot's readers, we believe that Dorothea is and
will always be a fairer and more attractive form than Dinah Morris or
Romola di Bardi, Fedalma or Mirah Cohen. In her sweet young enthusiasm,
often unguided or misguided by its ver