lem. But
with all its merits and even beauties, _Daniel Deronda_ has the fatal
defect of unpleasant characters who are neither beautiful nor
interesting, terrible situations which bore rather than terrify us, a
plot which is at once preposterous and wearisome. As to
_Middlemarch_--George Eliot's longest, most crowded, and ethically most
elaborated romance--with all its subtlety, its humour, its variety, and
its sardonic insight into provincial Philistinism, it becomes at last
tedious and disagreeable by reason of the interminable maunderings of
tedious men and women, and the slow and reiterated dissection of
disagreeable anatomies. At this moment I cannot, after twenty years,
recall the indefinite, lingering plot, or the precise relations to each
other of the curiously uninteresting families, who talk scandal and
fuss about in Middlemarch town.

In _Felix Holt_ I was naturally much interested, having read it in
manuscript, and advised upon the point of law, as appears from her
published letters in the _Life_ by J. Cross. There are two or three
lines--the lawyers' "opinion on the case"--which she asked me to
sketch; and I remember telling her when she inserted these lines in the
book, that I should always be able to say that I had written at least a
sentence which was embodied in English literature. _Felix Holt_
contains some fine characters and scenes, but it cannot be regarded as
equal to _Adam Bede_ and _Silas Marner_. We will not speak of
_Theophrastus Such_, 1879, written just before her death. It was the
work of a woman physically and intellectually exhausted. I feel a
certain guilty sense of disappointment when I think of the book, for I
possibly had some hand in causing it to be written. I had sent her a
long letter pointing out that our literature, with all its wealth of
achievement in every known sphere, was still deficient in one form of
composition in which the French stood paramount and alone. That was
what they called _Pensees_--moral and philosophical reflections in the
form of epigrams or rather aphorisms. I thought, and I still think,
that this form of composition was peculiarly suited to her genius, at
least in her prime. It was not in her prime when she painfully evolved
the sour affectations set forth in _Theophrastus_.

A word or two must be said about the _Poems_. They have poetic
subjects, ideas, similes: they are full of poetic yearning, crowded
with poetic imagery; they have everyt