ss creature. The ultimate eclipse, both of
Adam Bede and of Felix Holt would seem to justify my question. Tom
Tulliver is passionless, and Tom Tulliver lives gratefully in the
memory; but this, I take it, is because he is strictly a subordinate
figure, and awakens no reaction of feeling on the reader's part by
usurping a position which he is not the man to fill.

Dinah Morris is apparently a study from life; and it is warm praise to
say, that, in spite of the high key in which she is conceived, morally,
she retains many of the warm colors of life. But I confess that it is
hard to conceive of a woman so exalted by religious fervor remaining so
cool-headed and so temperate. There is in Dinah Morris too close an
agreement between her distinguished natural disposition and the action
of her religious faith. If by nature she had been passionate,
rebellious, selfish, I could better understand her actual
self-abnegation. I would look upon it as the logical fruit of a profound
religious experience. But as she stands, heart and soul go easily hand
in hand. I believe it to be very uncommon for what is called a religious
conversion merely to intensify and consecrate pre-existing inclinations.
It is usually a change, a wrench; and the new life is apt to be the more
sincere as the old one had less in common with it. But, as I have said,
Dinah Morris bears so many indications of being a reflection of facts
well known to the author,--and the phenomena of Methodism, from the
frequency with which their existence is referred to in her pages, appear
to be so familiar to her,--that I hesitate to do anything but thankfully
accept her portrait. About Hetty Sorrel I shall have no hesitation
whatever: I accept her with all my heart. Of all George Eliot's female
figures she is the least ambitious, and on the whole, I think, the most
successful. The part of the story which concerns her is much the most
forcible; and there is something infinitely tragic in the reader's sense
of the contrast between the sternly prosaic life of the good people
about her, their wholesome decency and their noonday probity, and the
dusky sylvan path along which poor Hetty is tripping, light-footed, to
her ruin. Hetty's conduct throughout seems to me to be thoroughly
consistent. The author has escaped the easy error of representing her as
in any degree made serious by suffering. She is vain and superficial by
nature; and she remains so to the end. As for Arthur Donnithor