er-wrought, like a picture which has been stippled over in every
surface.

A clever French woman said of George Eliot's conversation--_elle
s'ecoute quand elle parle_! Just so, as we read on we seem to see how
she held up each sentence into the light as it fell from her pen,
scrutinised it to see if some rarer phrase might not be compacted, some
subtler thought excogitated. Of all the more important tales, _Silas
Marner_ is that wherein we least feel this excessive thoughtfulness.
And thus it is the best. Perhaps other born romancers would have
thrown into it more life, energy, jollity, or passion. Thackeray would
have made the weaver a serio-comic hermit: Dickens would have made
Eppie a sentimental angel; Charlotte Bronte would have curdled our
blood; Trollope might have made more of Nancy's courting. But no one
of them could have given us a more lofty lesson "of the remedial
influences of pure, natural, human relations." The only doubt is,
whether a novel is the medium for such lessons. On this, opinions are,
and will remain, divided. The lesson and the art ought both to be
faultless.

When we ask for a romance fully developed and more than a graceful
vignette, _Adam Bede_ must be regarded as the principal, and with the
wider public it is always the typical, work of George Eliot. She said
herself that it seemed to her "impossible that she should ever write
anything so good and true again":--and herein she was no doubt right.
It is the only one of her works in prose or verse which we feel to be
inevitable, spontaneous, written out of the abundance of enjoyment and
experience. It is of all her books the heartiest, the wittiest, the
most cheerful, or rather the least desponding. In that book it may be
that she exhausted herself and her own resources of observation as an
eye-witness. She wrote fine things in other veins, in different
scenes, and she conceived other characters and new situations. But for
all practical purposes _Adam Bede_ was the typical romance, which
everything she had thought or known impelled her to write, in which she
told the best of what she had seen and the most important of what she
had to say. Had she never written anything but _Adam Bede_, she would
have had a special place of her own in English romance:--and I am not
sure that anything else which she produced very materially raised,
enlarged, or qualified that place.

_The Mill on the Floss_ must always be very interesting to a