the spot, costumes
archaeologically accurate, real armour, "properties" from famous
collections, a _mise-en-scene_ of lavish splendour and indefatigable
research--and then we ask, how can "Hamlet" or "Lear" live up to such
learning, and why is "Romeo" such a melancholy devil? Few men enjoyed
the earlier portions of _Romola_ more than I did. _Italianissimo_ and
_Florentissimo_ as I was, it was an intense treat. But, though I have
read and re-read _Romola_ from time to time, it has always been in
sections. I have never read it straight through at one time; and to
this hour, I am not quite clear about all the ramifications of the plot
and the various cross-purposes of the persons. Could any one say this
about _Quentin Durward_ or _Ivanhoe_, or of the _Last Days of Pompeii_,
or of _Esmond_ or even of _Hypatia_ or _Westward Ho!_

_Romola_, we know, tried its author most cruelly in composition, nor
need we wonder at this. "I began it,", she said, "a young woman--I
finished it an old woman." "It ploughed into her," said her husband,
"more than any of her other books." And, in my opinion, it marks the
decline of her genius. I cannot count any of the later books as equal
to her earlier works. Her great period of production reaches at most
over the six years 1858-1863 (aetat. 39-45), in which she produced
_Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1858), _Adam Bede_ (1859), _The Mill on the
Floss_ (1860), _Silas Marner_ (1861), and _Romola_ (1863). If we
measure by strict success in the highest art, this period should not be
extended beyond the four years which closed with _Silas Marner_.
_Romola_ is an ambitious, beautiful, altogether noble essay to fly
skyward like Icarus, whose ingenious mechanism was melted by the
sunlight in mid-career. And I cannot count any of the later pieces,
prose or verse, as anything but inferior to _Romola_. They have great
beauties, fine passages, subtle characters, and high conceptions--but
they are the artificial products of a brain that showed symptoms of
exhaustion, of a great writer who was striving after impossible tasks
without freedom and without enjoyment.

I cannot at all agree with those admirers of George Eliot's genius who
believe that it grew continuously in power, who even assure us that it
reached its zenith in _Daniel Deronda_. What can they mean? _Daniel
Deronda_, as usual, shows brilliant literary skill in many passages,
and its insight into modern Hebraism is a psychological prob