ove
him, or because he is uncongenial, but continues faithful to the end.
Like Maggie Tulliver and Romola, she has lofty aspirations, but marries,
after her husband's death, a versatile, brilliant, shallow Bohemian, as
ill-fitted for her serious nature as the dreary Casaubon himself.

Nor are we brought in sympathy with Lydgate, the fashionable doctor with
grand aims, since he allows his whole scientific aspirations to be
defeated by a selfish and extravagant wife. Rosamond Vincy is, however,
one of the best drawn characters in fiction, such as we often
see,--pretty, accomplished, clever, but incapable of making a sacrifice,
secretly thwarting her husband, full of wretched complaints, utterly
insincere, attractive perhaps to men, but despised by women. Caleb Garth
is a second Adam Bede; and Mrs. Cadwallader, the aristocratic wife of
the rector, is a second Mrs. Poyser in the glibness of her tongue and
in the thriftiness of her ways. Mr. Bullstrode, the rich banker, is a
character we unfortunately sometimes find in a large country town,--a
man of varied charities, a pillar of the Church, but as full of cant as
an egg is of meat; in fact, a hypocrite and a villain, ultimately
exposed and punished.

The general impression left on the mind from reading "Middlemarch" is
sad and discouraging. In it is brought out the blended stoicism,
humanitarianism, Buddhism, and agnosticism of the author. She paints the
"struggle of noble natures, struggling vainly against the currents of a
poor kind of world, without trust in an invisible Rock higher than
themselves to which they could entreat to be lifted up."

In another five years George Eliot produced "Daniel Deronda," the last
and most unsatisfactory of her great novels, written in feeble health
and with exhausted nervous energies, as she was passing through the
shadows of the evening of her life. In this work she doubtless essayed
to do her best; but she could not always surpass herself, any more than
could Scott or Dickens. Nor is she to be judged by those productions
which reveal her failing strength, but by those which were written in
the fresh enthusiasm of a lofty soul. No one thinks the less of Milton
because the "Paradise Regained" is not equal to the "Paradise Lost."
Many are the immortal poets who are now known only for two or three of
their minor poems. It takes a Michael Angelo to paint his grandest
frescos after reaching eighty years of age; or a Gladstone, to make his