y intensity, but always struggling
and tending on toward the highest good; in the touching maidenly
simplicity with which she at once identifies and accepts Mr Casaubon as
her guide and support toward a higher, less self-contained and
self-pleasing, more inclusive and all-embracing life; in the yearning
pain with which the first dread of possible disappointment dawns and
darkens over her, and the meek humility of her repentance on the one
faint betrayal--wrung from her by momentary anguish--of that
disappointment; in the tender wifely patience, reticence, forbearance,
with which she hides from all, the heart-gnawings of shattered and
expiring hope; the sense which she can no longer veil from her own
deepest consciousness that in Mr Casaubon there is no help or stay for
her and the unwearied though too soon unhoping earnestness with which she
labours to establish true relations between herself and her uncongenial
mate; in the patient yet crushing anguish of that long night's
heart-struggle which precedes the close--a struggle not against her own
higher self, but whether she dare bind down that higher self to a
lifelong, narrow, worthless task, and the aching consciousness of
what--almost against conscience and right--her answer must be;--there is
an inexpressible charm and loveliness in all this which no one, not
utterly dead to all that is fairest and best in womanhood, can fail to
recognise.

Not less wonderfully depicted is the guileless frankness which, from
first to last, characterises her whole relations to Ladislaw. If there
is one flaw in this noble work, it is that Ladislaw on first examination
is scarcely equal to this exquisite creation. Yet it might have been
nearly as difficult even for George Eliot to satisfy our instinctive
cravings in this particular with regard to Dorothea, as in respect to
Romola or Fedalma. And when we study her portrait of Ladislaw more
carefully, there is a latent beauty and nobleness about him; an innate
and intense reverence for the highest and purest, and an unvarying aim
and struggle toward it; an utter scorn and loathing of everything mean
and base,--that almost makes us cancel the word flaw. We recognise this
nobleness of nature almost on his first appearance, in the deep reverence
with which he regards Dorothea, the fulness with which he penetrates the
guileless candour of the relation she assumes to him, the entireness of
his trust in the spotless purity of her whole natu