. Gilfil's Love Story_; and _Janet's
Repentance_]. By GEORGE ELIOT. Second Edition. 2 vols. Edinburgh and
London, 1859.

2. _Adam Bede_. By GEORGE ELIOT. Sixth Edition, 2 vols. 1859.

3. _The Mill on the Floss_. By GEORGE ELIOT. 3 vols. 1860.

We frequently hear the remark, that in the present day everything is
tending to uniformity--that all minds are taught to think alike, that
the days of novelty have departed. To us, however, it appears that the
age abounds in new and abnormal modes of thought--we had almost said,
forms of being. What could be so new and so unlikely as that the young
and irreproachable maiden daughter of a clergyman should have produced
so extraordinary a work as "Jane Eyre,"--a work of which we were
compelled to express the opinion that the unknown and mysterious "Currer
Bell" held "a heathenish doctrine of religion"; that the ignorance which
the book displayed as to the proprieties of female dress was hardly
compatible with the idea of its having been written by a woman; but
that, if a woman at all, the writer must be "one who had, for some
sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex."

In attempting to guess at the character and circumstances of the writer,
a reviewer could only choose among such types of men and women as he had
known, or heard, or read of. An early European settler in Australia, in
conjecturing whether his garden had been ravaged by a bird or by a
quadruped, would not light readily on the conception of an
ornithorhynchus; and assuredly no one accustomed only to ordinary men
and women could have divined the character, the training, and the
position of Charlotte Bronte, as they have been made known to us by her
biographer's unsparing revelations. It was not to be expected that any
one should have imagined the life of Howorth [Trasncriber's note: sic]
parsonage; the gifted, wayward, and unhappy sisterhood in their
cheerless home; the rudeness of the only society which was within their
reach; while their views of anything beyond their own immediate circle,
and certain unpleasing forms of school-life which they had known, were
drawn from the representations of a brother whose abilities they
regarded with awe, but who in other respects appears to have been an
utterly worthless debauchee; lying and slandering, bragging not only of
the sins which he had committed, but of many which he had not committed;
thoroughly depraved himself, and tainting the thoughts of all