imely beautiful women,--few heroes. I can't afford to give all my
love and reverence to such rarities; I want a great deal of those
feelings for my every-day fellowmen, especially for the few in the
foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I
touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.... I herewith
discharge my conscience," our author continues, "and declare that I have
had quite enthusiastic movements of admiration toward old gentlemen who
spoke the worst English, who were occasionally fretful in their temper,
and who had never moved in a higher sphere of influence than that of
parish overseer; and that the way in which I have come to the conclusion
that human nature is lovable--the way I have learnt something of its
deep pathos, its sublime mysteries--has been by living a great deal
among people more or less commonplace and vulgar, of whom you would
perhaps hear nothing very surprising if you were to inquire about them
in the neighborhoods where they dwelt."

But even in the absence of any such avowed predilections as these, a
brief glance over the principal figures of her different works would
assure us that our author's sympathies are with common people. Silas
Marner is a linen-weaver, Adam Bede is a carpenter, Maggie Tulliver is a
miller's daughter, Felix Holt is a watchmaker, Dinah Morris works in a
factory, and Hetty Sorrel is a dairy-maid. Esther Lyon, indeed, is a
daily governess; but Tito Melema alone is a scholar. In the "Scenes of
Clerical Life," the author is constantly slipping down from the
clergymen, her heroes, to the most ignorant and obscure of their
parishioners. Even in "Romola" she consecrates page after page to the
conversation of the Florentine populace. She is as unmistakably a
painter of _bourgeois_ life as Thackeray was a painter of the life of
drawing-rooms.

Her opportunities for the study of the manners of the solid lower
classes have evidently been very great. We have her word for it that she
has lived much among the farmers, mechanics, and small traders of that
central region of England which she has made known to us under the name
of Loamshire. The conditions of the popular life in this district in
that already distant period to which she refers the action of most of
her stories--the end of the last century and the beginning of the
present--were so different from any that have been seen in America, that
an American, in treating of her books, must b