flexibility. The dry, minute,
unprofitable spirit of criticism is well indicated by Bardo Bardi, which
had no originality and no fresh vitality, but which loved to comment on the
classic writers at tedious length, and to collate passages for purposes the
most foreign from any practical aim life could possibly afford. In the
conception of Tito, George Eliot has quite surpassed herself, and in all
literature there is no delineation of a character surpassing this. One of
her critics says there is no character in her novels "more subtly devised
or more consistently developed. His serpentine beauty, his winning
graciousness, his aesthetic refinement, his masculine energy of intellect,
his insinuating affectionateness, with his selfish love of pleasure and his
cowardly recoil from pain, his subdulous serenity and treacherous calm, as
of a faithless summer sea, make up a being that at once fascinates and
repels, that invites love, but turns our love into loathing almost before
we have given it." [Footnote: Westminster Review, July, 1881.] Mr. R.H.
Hutton has expressed his conviction that this is one of the most skilfully
painted of all the characters in fictitious literature. He says, "A
character essentially treacherous only because it is full of soft placid
selfishness is one of the most difficult to paint;" but in sketching Tito's
career, "the same wonderful power is maintained throughout, of stamping on
our imagination with the full force of a master hand a character which
seems naturally too fluent for the artist's purpose. There is not a more
masterly piece of painting in English romance than this figure of Tito."

Romola represents the divided interests of one who was affected by both the
renaissance and Christianity. Brought up to know only what the renaissance
had to teach, to delight in culture and to ignore religion, her contact
with Savonarola opened a new world to her mind. Her experience in life led
her to seek some deeper moral anchorage than was afforded by the culture of
her father and husband, yet she could not follow Savonarola into the region
of mystical visions and other-worldliness. Her life having broken loose
from the ties of love through the faithlessness of Tito, and from the ties
of tradition through the failure of culture to satisfy her heart, she
drifts out into the world, to find, under the leadership of the great
preacher, that life's highest duty is renunciation. His influence over the
noblest sou