gn setting of her story enabled her to
give a larger utterance to her thoughts, while there was less of personal
and pathetic interest to impede their expression. This is also true of _The
Spanish Gypsy_, that it has more of teaching and less of merely literary
attraction than any other of her longer poems. The purpose to do justice to
the homely life of rustic England was no longer present, and she was free
to give her intellectual powers a deliberate expression in the form of a
thoughtful interpretation of a great historic period. Mr. Henry James, Jr.,
has recognized the importance of this effort, and says of _Romola_, that
he regards it, "on the whole, as decidedly the most important of her
works,--not the most entertaining nor the most readable, but the one in
which the largest things are attempted and grasped. The figure of
Savonarola, subordinate though it is, is a figure on a larger scale than
any which George Eliot has elsewhere undertaken; and in the career of Tito
Melema there is a fuller representation of the development of a character.
Considerable as are our author's qualities as an artist, and largely as
they are displayed in _Romola_, the book is less a work of art than a work
of morals. Like all of George Eliot's works, its dramatic construction is
feeble; the story drags and halts,--the setting is too large for the
picture."

The book lacks in spontaneity, is too deliberate, contemplative and
ethical. While its artistic elements are great, and even powerful, it is
too consciously moral in its purpose to satisfy the literary requirements
of a work of art. It wants the sensuous elements of life and the _abandon_
of poetic genius. There is little which is sensational about the book; too
little, perhaps, of that vivid imaginative interest which impels the reader
headlong through the pages of a novel to the end. It is, however, a high
merit in George Eliot, that she does not resort to factitious elements of
interest in her books, but works honestly, conscientiously, and with a pure
purpose. If the reader is not drawn on by the sensational, he is amply
repaid by the more deliberate and natural interest which gives a meaning to
every chapter.

George Eliot selected for her book one of the most striking and picturesque
periods of modern history, in the great centre of culture and art in the
fifteenth century. Florence was the intellectual capital of the world in
the renaissance period, and the truest representa