the suspicion of
surreptitious borrowing, but establishes the truthfulness, or at least
the plausibility, of what might otherwise have been considered
improbable inventions. This frankness, which, after all, sheds no new
light upon his method of composition, seems to have had the happy, if
undesigned, effect of throwing his critics off the true scent. The real
plagiarism in _A Simpleton_ lies not in the details, but in the
conception. The "situation" which leads to all the embroilments and
developments is the apparently ill-assorted union of a man of science
and genius, absorbed in the labors of investigation and discovery,
practical in his views of life and upright in all his actions, with an
ill-trained and unintellectual beauty, whose perfections of form and
face, pretty coquetry, studied artlessness and sweet recognition of the
value of masculine knowledge and strength as the proper stay of feminine
weakness and the proper organ of the feminine will, assail the superior
being just at that point where his perceptions are weakest, and lead him
an easy captive. When we add that this Samson is a young medical man,
marked out for the highest honors of his profession, and that his career
is temporarily blighted at the outset through the extravagance,
silliness and deception of his wife, we have given an outline which no
reader of _Middlemarch_ will require to have paralleled. Dr. Christopher
Staines is matched and contrasted with Rosa Lusignan, precisely as
Lydgate is matched and contrasted with Rosamond Vincy. There is even a
further resemblance in the minor pairing and natural dissonance of Phebe
Dale and Reginald Falcon in the one book and of Mary Garth and Fred
Vincy in its predecessor; while Lady Cicely Treherne, though her
simplicity, unlike that of Dorothea, is merely assumed, is almost as
unworldly as that heroine, makes a similar use of her wealth and social
advantages, stands in much the same relation to the other characters,
serves them in the same manner, and ends by marrying her Will Ladislaw
under the designation of a "mercurial Irish gentleman" not further
introduced to the reader. It will be understood that it is not the
characters, in the proper sense of the word, that Mr. Reade has
borrowed. In fact, George Eliot's characters are too intimately
associated with their surroundings, the circumstances in which they are
placed enter too largely as elements into their nature, to allow of
their being transplante