r-maids, the repartees of
jocose hostlers, the mail-coach announced by the many blasts of the
bugle, the green willows of the water-courses, the patient cart-horses,
the full-uddered cows, the rich pastures, the picturesque milkmaids, the
shepherd with his slouching walk, the laborer with his bread and bacon,
the tidy kitchen-garden, the golden corn-ricks, the bushy hedgerows
bright with the blossoms of the wild convolvulus, the comfortable
parsonage, the old parish church with its ivy-mantled towers, the
thatched cottage with double daisies and geraniums in the
window-seats,--these and other details bring before our minds a rural
glory which has passed away before the power of steam, and may never
again return.

"Felix Holt" was published in 1866, and it was five years before
"Middlemarch" appeared,--a very long novel, thought by some to be the
best which George Eliot has written; read fifteen times, it is said, by
the Prince of Wales. In this novel the author seems to have been
ambitious to sustain her fame. She did not, like Trollope, dash off
three novels a year, and all alike. She did not write mechanically, as a
person grinds at a mill. Nor was she greedy of money, to be spent in
running races with the rich. She was a conscientious writer from first
to last. Yet "Middlemarch," with all the labor spent upon it, has more
faults than any of her preceding novels. It is as long as "The History
of Sir Charles Grandison;" it has a miserable plot; it has many tedious
chapters, and too many figures, and too much theorizing on social
science. Rather than a story, it is a panorama of the doctors and
clergymen and lawyers and business people who live in a provincial town,
with their various prejudices and passions and avocations. It is not a
cheerful picture of human life. We are brought to see an unusual number
of misers, harpies, quacks, cheats, and hypocrites. There are but few
interesting characters in it: Dorothea is the most so,--a very noble
woman, but romantic, and making great mistakes. She desires to make
herself useful to somebody, and marries a narrow, jealous, aristocratic
pedant, who had spent his life in elaborate studies on a dry and
worthless subject. Of course, she awakes from her delusion when she
discovers what a small man, with great pretensions, her learned husband
is; but she remains in her dreariness of soul a generous, virtuous, and
dutiful woman. She does not desert her husband because she does not l