nd the comprehensive understanding of human experience with
which her books abound. She often turns aside to discuss the problems
suggested by the experiences of her characters, to point out how the effect
of their own thoughts and deeds re-act upon them, and to inculcate the
highest ethical lessons. In one of her "asides" she seems to reject this
method, in referring to Fielding.

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the
happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his
place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is
observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions
as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial
chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to
bring his arm-chair to the proscenium, and chat with us in all the
lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were
longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer
afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter
evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and
if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as
if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I, at least, have so
much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were
woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be
concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that
tempting range of relevancies called the universe. [Footnote:
Middlemarch, chapter XV.]

She does not ramble away from her subject, it is true; but she likes to
pause often to discuss the doings of her personages, and to pour forth some
tender or noble thought. To many of her readers these bits of wisdom and of
sentiment are among the most valuable portions of her books, when taken in
their true environment in her pages. She has a purpose larger than that of
telling a story or of describing the loves of a few men and women. She
seeks to penetrate into the motives of life, and to reveal the hidden
springs of action; to show how people affect each other; how ideas mould
the destinies of the individual. To do all this in that large, artistic
spirit she has followed, requires that there shall be something more
than narration and conversation. That she has now and then commented
unnecessarily, and in