clever for a gell"--is foolish, vain, self-willed,
and always in some silly scrape or other; and when grown up, her
behaviour is such, even before the climax of the affair with Stephen
Guest, that the dislike of the St. Ogg's ladies for her might have been
very sufficiently accounted for even if they had not had reason to envy
her superior beauty.

But of all the characters for whom our authoress has been pleased to
bespeak our interest, Hetty Sorrel is the most remarkable for unamiable
qualities. She is represented as "distractingly pretty," and we hear a
great deal about her "kitten-like beauty," and her graceful movements,
looks, and attitudes. But this is all that can be said for her. Her mind
has no room for anything but looks and dress; she has no feeling for
anybody but her little self; and is only too truly declared by Mrs.
Poyser to be "no better than a peacock, as 'ud strut about on the wall,
and spread its tail when the sun shone, if all the folks i' the parish
was dying"--"no better nor a cherry, wi' a hard stone inside it."[1]
Over and over this view of Hetty's character is enforced on us, from the
time when, early in the first volume, we are told that hers "was a
springtide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things,
round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of
innocence.[2] ..."

[1] "Adam Bede," i. 228; ii. 75.
[2] _ibid_., i. 119.

Her conduct throughout is such as to offend and disgust; and the
authoress does not seem to be sufficiently aware that, while the
descriptions of the little coquette's beauty leave that to be imagined,
her follies and faults and crimes are set before us as matters of hard,
unmistakeable fact, so that the reader is in no danger of being blinded
by the charms which blinded Adam Bede, and Hetty consequently appears as
little else than contemptible when she is not odious. Yet it is on this
silly, heartless, and wicked little thing that the interest of the story
is made to rest. Her agonies, as we have already said, are depicted with
very great power; yet, if they touch our hearts, it is merely because
they _are_ agonies, and our feeling is unmixed with any regard for the
sufferer herself.

This habit of representing her characters without any concealment of
their faults is, no doubt, connected with that faculty which enables the
authoress to give them so remarkable an air of reality. There are,
indeed, exceptions to this, as there are in almost ever