most sympathetic friend and critic, and when he died, in 1878, the loss
seemed to be more than she could bear. Her letters of this period are
touching in their loneliness and their craving for sympathy. Later she
astonished everybody by marrying John Walter Cross, much younger than
herself, who is known as her biographer. "Deep down below there is a river
of sadness, but ... I am able to enjoy my newly re-opened life," writes
this woman of sixty, who, ever since she was the girl whom we know as
Maggie Tulliver, must always have some one to love and to depend upon. Her
new interest in life lasted but a few months, for she died in December of
the same year (1880). One of the best indications of her strength and her
limitations is her portrait, with its strong masculine features, suggesting
both by resemblance and by contrast that wonderful portrait of Savonarola
which hangs over his old desk in the monastery at Florence.

WORKS OF GEORGE ELIOT. These are conveniently divided into three groups,
corresponding to the three periods of her life. The first group includes
all her early essays and miscellaneous work, from her translation of
Strauss's _Leben Jesu_, in 1846, to her union with Lewes in 1854. The
second group includes _Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, Mill on the
Floss_, and _Silas Marner_, all published between 1858 and 1861. These four
novels of the middle period are founded on the author's own life and
experience; their scenes are laid in the country, and their characters are
taken from the stolid people of the Midlands, with whom George Eliot had
been familiar since childhood. They are probably the author's most enduring
works. They have a naturalness, a spontaneity, at times a flash of real
humor, which are lacking in her later novels; and they show a rapid
development of literary power which reaches a climax in _Silas Marner_.

The novel of Italian life, _Romola_ (1862-1863), marks a transition to the
third group, which includes three more novels,--_Felix Holt_ (1866),
_Middlemarch_ (1871-1872), _Daniel Deronda_ (1876), the ambitious dramatic
poem _The Spanish Gypsy_ (1868), and a collection of miscellaneous essays
called _The Impressions of Theophrastus Such_ (1879). The general
impression, of these works is not so favorable as that produced by the
novels of the middle period. They are more labored and less interesting;
they contain much deep reflection and analysis of character, but less
observation, less