native dulness or a lively addiction to the lowest prose.
[Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XXXVI.]

This introduction of a scientific illustration will serve to bring another
tendency of George Eliot's to our attention. She makes a frequent use of
her large learning and culture in her novels. In the earlier ones a Greek
quotation is to be found here and there, while in the later, German seems
to have the preference. In _The Mill on the Floss_ she describes Bob
Jakin's thumb as "a singularly broad specimen of that difference between
the man and the monkey." Such references to recent scientific speculations
are not unfrequent. If they serve to show the tendencies of her mind
towards knowledge and large thought, they also indicate a too ready
willingness to imbibe, and to use in a popular manner, what is not
thoroughly assimilated truth. The force of such an illustration as the
following must be lost on most novel-readers:--

Although Sir James was a sportsman, he had some other feelings toward
women than toward grouse and foxes, and did not regard his future wife
in the light of prey, valuable chiefly for the excitements of the
chase. Neither was he so well acquainted with the habits of primitive
races as to feel that an ideal combat for her, tomahawk in hand, so to
speak, was necessary to the historical continuity of the marriage tie.
[Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter VI.]

It is doubtful whether any reader will quite catch the meaning of this
sentence:

Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of
prematrimonial acquaintanceship? [Footnote: Ibid, chapter II.]

Many of her critics have asserted that this use of the language of science,
and the adoption of the speculative ideas of the time, had largely
increased upon George Eliot in her later books; but this is not true. In
her _Westminster Review_ essays both tendencies are strongly developed. In
one of them she says, "The very chyme and chyle of a rector are conscious
of the gown and band." Again, she says,--

The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of
ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required
for spontaneous activity; the voltaic pile is not strong enough to
produce crystallization.

It is not just to George Eliot, however, to refer to such mere casual
blemishes, without insisting on the largeness of thought, the wealth of
knowledge, a