sinterested, and
on whom grand sentiments are lost,--yet kind-hearted in the main, and in
the case of the Dobsons redeemed by a sort of family pride. The moral of
the story is the usual one with George Eliot,--the conflict of duty with
passion, and the inexorable fate which pursues the sinner. She brings
out the power of conscience as forcibly as Hawthorne has done in his
"Scarlet Letter."

The "Mill on the Floss" was soon followed by "Silas Marner," regarded by
some as the gem of George Eliot's novels, and which certainly--though
pathetic and sad, as all her novels are--does not leave on the mind so
mournful an impression, since in its outcome we see redemption. The
principal character--the poor, neglected, forlorn weaver--emerges at
length from the Everlasting Nay into the Everlasting Yea; and he emerges
by the power of love,--love for a little child whom he has rescued from
the snow, the storm, and death. Driven by injustice to a solitary life,
to abject penury, to despair, the solitary miser, gloating over his gold
pieces,--which he has saved by the hardest privation, and in which he
trusts,--finds himself robbed, without redress or sympathy; but in the
end he is consoled for his loss in the love he bestows on a helpless
orphan, who returns it with the most noble disinterestedness, and lives
to be his solace and his pride. Nothing more touching has ever been
written by man or woman than this short story, as full of pathos as
"Adam Bede" is full of humor.

What is remarkable in this story is that the plot is exactly similar to
that of "Jermola the Potter," the masterpiece of a famous Polish
novelist,--a marvellous coincidence, or plagiarism, difficult to be
explained. But Shakspeare, the most original of men, borrowed some of
his plots from Italian writers; and Mirabeau appropriated the knowledge
of men more learned than he, which by felicity of genius he made his
own; and Webster, too, did the same thing. There is nothing new under
the sun, except in the way of "putting things."

After the publication of the various novels pertaining to the rural and
humble life of England, with which George Eliot was so well acquainted,
into which she entered with so much sympathy, and which she so
marvellously portrayed, she took a new departure, entering a field with
which she was not so well acquainted, and of which she could only learn
through books. The result was "Romola," the most ambitious, and in some
respects the most