l-usage; and the story deals less with her lapse into disgrace than
with her redemption, through the kind offices of the Reverend Edgar
Tryan,--by virtue of which, indeed, it takes its place in the clerical
series. I cannot help thinking that the stern and tragical character of
the subject has been enfeebled by the over-diffuseness of the narrative
and the excess of local touches. The abundance of the author's
recollections and observations of village life clogs the dramatic
movement, over which she has as yet a comparatively slight control. In
her subsequent works the stouter fabric of the story is better able to
support this heavy drapery of humor and digression.

To a certain extent, I think "Silas Marner" holds a higher place than
any of the author's works. It is more nearly a masterpiece; it has more
of that simple, rounded, consummate aspect, that absence of loose ends
and gaping issues, which marks a classical work. What was attempted in
it, indeed, was within more immediate reach than the heart-trials of
Adam Bede and Maggie Tulliver. A poor, dull-witted, disappointed
Methodist cloth-weaver; a little golden-haired foundling child; a
well-meaning, irresolute country squire, and his patient, childless
wife;--these, with a chorus of simple, beer-loving villagers, make up
the _dramatis personae_. More than any of its brother-works, "Silas
Marner," I think, leaves upon the mind a deep impression of the grossly
material life of agricultural England in the last days of the old
_regime_,--the days of full-orbed Toryism, of Trafalgar and of Waterloo,
when the invasive spirit of French domination threw England back upon a
sense of her own insular solidity, and made her for the time doubly,
brutally, morbidly English. Perhaps the best pages in the work are the
first thirty, telling the story of poor Marner's disappointments in
friendship and in love, his unmerited disgrace, and his long, lonely
twilight-life at Raveloe, with the sole companionship of his loom, in
which his muscles moved "with such even repetition, that their pause
seemed almost as much a constraint as the holding of his breath." Here,
as in all George Eliot's books, there is a middle life and a low life;
and here, as usual, I prefer the low life. In "Silas Marner," in my
opinion, she has come nearest the mildly rich tints of brown and gray,
the mellow lights and the undreadful corner-shadows of the Dutch masters
whom she emulates. One of the chapters contai