tion the
blotches, burrs and pimples in which the paltry nature resembles his
own. The "Mill on the Floss" is perhaps the most striking instance
extant of this study of cutaneous disease. There is not a single person
in the book of the smallest importance to anybody in the world but
themselves, or whose qualities deserved so much as a line of printer's
type in their description. There is no girl alive, fairly clever, half
educated, and unluckily related, whose life has not at least as much in
it as Maggie's, to be described and to be pitied. Tom is a clumsy and
cruel lout, with the making of better things in him (and the same may be
said of nearly every Englishman at present smoking and elbowing his way
through the ugly world his blunders have contributed to the making of);
while the rest of the characters are simply the sweepings out of a
Pentonville omnibus.[100]

109. And it is very necessary that we should distinguish this
essentially Cockney literature, developed only in the London suburbs,
and feeding the demand of the rows of similar brick houses, which branch
in devouring cancer round every manufacturing town,--from the really
romantic literature of France. Georges Sand is often immoral; but she is
always beautiful, and in the characteristic novel I have named, "Le
Peche de Mons. Antoine," the five principal characters, the old Cavalier
Marquis,--the Carpenter,--M. de Chateaubrun,--Gilberte,--and the really
passionate and generous lover, are all as heroic and radiantly ideal as
Scott's Colonel Mannering, Catherine Seyton, and Roland Graeme; while
the landscape is rich and true with the emotion of years of life passed
in glens of Norman granite and beside bays of Italian sea. But in the
English Cockney school, which consummates itself in George Eliot, the
personages are picked up from behind the counter and out of the gutter;
and the landscape, by excursion train to Gravesend, with return ticket
for the City-road.

110. But the second reason for the dullness of Scott to the uneducated
or miseducated reader lies far deeper; and its analysis is related to
the most subtle questions in the Arts of Design.

The mixed gayety and gloom in the plan of any modern novel fairly clever
in the make of it, may be likened, almost with precision, to the
patchwork of a Harlequin's dress, well spangled; a pretty thing enough,
if the human form beneath it be graceful and active. Few personages on
the stage are more delightful to