a way. It is perhaps a secret; but
until it is found out, I think that the art of story-telling cannot be
said to have approached perfection.

When you re-read coldly and critically a book which in former years you
have read warmly and carelessly, you are surprised to see how it changes
its proportions. It falls away in those parts which have been
pre-eminent in your memory, and it increases in the small portions.
Until I lately read "Adam Bede" for a second time, Mrs. Poyser was in my
mind its representative figure; for I remembered a number of her
epigrammatic sallies. But now, after a second reading, Mrs. Poyser is
the last figure I think of, and a fresh perusal of her witticisms has
considerably diminished their classical flavor. And if I must tell the
truth, Adam himself is next to the last; and sweet Dinah Morris third
from the last. The person immediately evoked by the title of the work is
poor Hetty Sorrel. Mrs. Poyser is _too_ epigrammatic; her wisdom smells
of the lamp. I do not mean to say that she is not natural, and that
women of her class are not often gifted with her homely fluency, her
penetration, and her turn for forcible analogies. But she is too
sustained; her morality is too shrill,--too much in _staccato_; she too
seldom subsides into the commonplace. Yet it cannot be denied that she
puts things very happily. Remonstrating with Dinah Morris on the undue
disinterestedness of her religious notions, "But for the matter o'
that," she cries, "if everybody was to do like you, the world must come
to a stand-still; for if everybody tried to do without house and home
and eating and drinking, and was always talking as we must despise the
things o' the world, as you say, I should like to know where the pick of
the stock, and the corn, and the best new milk-cheeses 'ud have to go?
_Everybody 'ud be wanting to make bread o' tail ends_, and everybody 'ud
be running after everybody else to preach to 'em, i'stead o' bringing up
their families and laying by against a bad harvest." And when Hetty
comes home late from the Chase, and alleges in excuse that the clock at
home is so much earlier than the clock at the great house: "What, you'd
be wanting the clock set by gentlefolks' time, would you? an' sit up
burning candle, and lie a-bed wi' the sun a-bakin' you, like a cowcumber
i' the frame?" Mrs. Poyser has something almost of Yankee shrewdness and
angularity; but the figure of a New England rural housewife would la