her
to remove.... She was a very mild, patient woman, whose nature it was to
seek out all the sadder and more serious elements of life and pasture
her mind upon them." She stamps I. H. S. on her cakes and loaves without
knowing what the letters mean, or indeed without knowing that they are
letters, being very much surprised that Marner can "read 'em
off,"--chiefly because they are on the pulpit cloth at church. She
touches upon religious themes in a manner to make the superficial reader
apprehend that she cultivates some polytheistic form of faith,--extremes
meet. She urges Marner to go to church, and describes the satisfaction
which she herself derives from the performance of her religious duties.

"If you've niver had no church, there's no telling what good it'll do
you. For I feel as set up and comfortable as niver was, when I've been
and heard the prayers and the singing to the praise and glory o' God, as
Mr. Macey gives out,--and Mr. Crackenthorp saying good words and more
partic'lar on Sacramen' day; and if a bit o' trouble comes, I feel as I
can put up wi' it, for I've looked for help i' the right quarter, and
giv myself up to Them as we must all give ourselves up to at the last:
and if we've done our part, it isn't to be believed as Them as are above
us 'ud be worse nor we are, and come short o' Theirn."

"The plural pronoun," says the author, "was no heresy of Dolly's, but
only her way of avoiding a presumptuous familiarity." I imagine that
there is in no other English novel a figure so simple in its elements as
this of Dolly Winthrop, which is so real without being contemptible, and
so quaint without being ridiculous.

In all those of our author's books which have borne the name of the hero
or heroine,--"Adam Bede," "Silas Marner," "Romola," and "Felix
Holt,"--the person so put forward has really played a subordinate part.
The author may have set out with the intention of maintaining him
supreme; but her material has become rebellious in her hands, and the
technical hero has been eclipsed by the real one. Tito is the leading
figure in "Romola." The story deals predominantly, not with Romola as
affected by Tito's faults, but with Tito's faults as affecting first
himself, and incidentally his wife. Godfrey Cass, with his lifelong
secret, is by right the hero of "Silas Marner." Felix Holt, in the work
which bears his name, is little more than an occasional apparition; and
indeed the novel has no hero, but only