ck a
whole range of Mrs. Poyser's feelings, which, whatever may be its effect
in real life, gives its subject in a novel at least a very picturesque
richness of color; the constant sense, namely, of a superincumbent layer
of "gentlefolks," whom she and her companions can never raise their
heads unduly without hitting.

My chief complaint with Adam Bede himself is that he is too good. He is
meant, I conceive, to be every inch a man; but, to my mind, there are
several inches wanting. He lacks spontaneity and sensibility, he is too
stiff-backed. He lacks that supreme quality without which a man can
never be interesting to men,--the capacity to be tempted. His nature is
without richness or responsiveness. I doubt not that such men as he
exist, especially in the author's thrice-English Loamshire; she has
partially described them as a class, with a felicity which carries
conviction. She claims for her hero that, although a plain man, he was
as little an ordinary man as he was a genius.

"He was not an average man. Yet such men as he are reared here and there
in every generation of our peasant artisans, with an inheritance of
affections nurtured by a simple family life of common need and common
industry, and an inheritance of faculties trained in skilful, courageous
labor; they make their way upward, rarely as geniuses, most commonly as
painstaking, honest men, with the skill and conscience to do well the
tasks that lie before them. Their lives have no discernible echo beyond
the neighborhood where they dwelt; but you are almost sure to find there
some good piece of road, some building, some application of mineral
produce, some improvement in farming practice, some reform of parish
abuses, with which their names are associated by one or two generations
after them. Their employers were the richer for them; the work of their
hands has worn well, and the work of their brains has guided well the
hands of other men."

One cannot help feeling thankful to the kindly writer who attempts to
perpetuate their memories beyond the generations which profit
immediately by their toil. If she is not a great dramatist, she is at
least an exquisite describer. But one can as little help feeling that it
is no more than a strictly logical retribution, that in her hour of need
(dramatically speaking) she should find them indifferent to their duties
as heroes. I profoundly doubt whether the central object of a novel may
successfully be a passionle