when he could strike some angle of his own mind sharply against an opposing angle in the mind of another; and I suppose it was from this cause that even his letters had much more of the true humorous element than had those productions of his which were written with a deliberately comic intent. The latter were apt to be somewhat forced and heavy, except when produced, as they occasionally were, during a veritable afflatus of fun. Then his mirth would be free, fluent, and almost boisterous; but on these occasions there was sure to be a strong infusion of the personal element; I do not mean of satire or sarcasm necessarily, but just that sort of infusion which is found in most of the essays of Charles Lamb. "You see," he said to me one day, "it is so hard for me to be funny; I have such a narrow range of subjects. A man like Dickens can grind fun out of a pump, or a door-knocker, or a bedstead, or anything in the universe, while I can do nothing whatever unless I have men and women, with the additional disadvantage of being set down in a place where, after you have contemplated them for a little while, the men and women seem all alike. I am really an ill-used individual. I feel just as Dickens would feel if he were shut up in a prison with a hundred pumps, and a hundred bedsteads, all of the same pattern, and were told that he must fill a shilling number with jokes upon them, once a month for twenty years."

Pelican's strength, therefore, was thrown into those

E

graver papers in which he could give his critical and speculative faculties full play; and the two or three little bits of criticism which follow show something of the ordinary bent of his mind, and show also what were the literary and intellectual characteristics which most strongly appealed to him. In the paragraph concerning the Mill on the Floss, there is more than one opinion expressed which will be hesitatingly received or unhesitatingly rejected by most readers. His passing attack on Shakspeare will be universally regarded as an act of literary treason; but he always had rather heretical views of the claims of the Swan of Avon.

He held the theory that, as before the time of Coleridge, Shakspeare had been unduly neglected, so, since that time he had been extravagantly exalted; and that a second reaction, perhaps more unreasonable than the first, was not far distant. "The Shakspeare religion may be all very well for you," said he to an enthusiast, "but I hardly see my way yet to accepting him as a literary Messiah. When I am a little less busy, however, I will give some time to a study of the evidences, and then you shall hear the result." Another of his extravagant and daring utterances was to the effect that the character of Midwinter in Mr. Wilkie Collins' "Armadale" was equal in conception, if not in execution, to Shakspeare's character of Hamlet. A man who could deliberately say this was obviously in a hopeless condition.

For the other portion of the paragraph a better defence might perhaps be made. Pelican's persistent preference of the Mill on the Floss to its great predecessor, was not maintained in ignorance of the artistic superiority of the older work, but for artistic merit, as such, he cared very little. The construction of a book was a secondary matter with him, unless the whole merit of the work depended upon it. The art which helped to show a thing clearly and truly he valued as highly as any one; as his own words, I think, sufficiently show.

The Mill on the Floss is pervaded throughout by the noble quality which strikes one so forcibly in all George Eliot's works, and which, even in these days of realistic art, is so rare ;-the more than Shakspearian fidelity to the truth of nature. I say more than Shakspearian, because Shakspeare-wonderful painter of men and women as he is-is sometimes led captive by his own power, and we have a wealth of poetry, or thought, or wit, which cannot but strike us as incongruous and untrue. Such a catastrophe never befals George Eliot. The activity of her penetrative imagination is not more marked than its harmonious restraint; she is always master of her faculties, never their slave. This absolute imaginative truthfulness is, as I have said, a conspicuous characteristic of all her books; but it is more striking and remarkable in the Mill on the Floss than it is in Adam Bede; because in the former book she has to

deal with characters infinitely more difficult to pourtray faithfully than those which appear in the pages of the latter. Maggie, Tom, and Philip have a complexity of moral nature which renders it singularly difficult so to draw them that they shall stand out from the canvas as real living human beings, with every feature of that nature shown in proper focus. Adam Bede, Hetty, Dinah, and Arthur, are all simple natures, devoid of those inconsistencies which baffle us so often when we attempt the study of character. We can soon sum them up, and note down their ruling qualities. Adam is conscientious, persistent, self-reliant, tender. Hetty is vain, selfish, ambitious. Dinah is devoted, unselfish, spiritual. Arthur is good-natured, pleasure-loving, weak. How easy it is thus to describe and define the personages in Adam Bede-all characters simple in nature and narrow in range. You will not find it so easy thus to label those in the Mill on the Floss, for they are creations of greater complexity and wider humanity. They differ from the characters in Adam Bede as a chord in music differs from a single note, or as a mighty chorus, with individual discords but one pervading harmony, differs from the simple melody of a popular air. Of course the latter appeal to a wider audience, but we can hardly consider that fact a proof of superior merit.

The book not only gives us the impression of singular fidelity to truth and nature-which is, as commonly, though wrongly understood, one of the passive literary

virtues, but of altogether exceptional intellectual activity, constantly present, and yet always restrained, and never displayed for the mere purpose of display. Mr. Ruskin says that those pictures convey "the highest ideas of power, which attain the most perfect end with the slightest possible means; not, observe, those in which though much has been done with little, all has not been done; but from the picture in which all has been done, and yet not a touch thrown away." There could not be a better description of George Eliot's work, and particularly of the kind of work she has produced in this book. Every little sketch, however subordinate, is perfectly finished; not a word is wasted; not an epithet wrongly placed; every stroke tells: and yet the manifestations of this perfect art are so subtle, that while reading it does not strike us as art at all. Only when we close the book do we receive the impression of its wonderful power. We see then how everything needful has been accomplished with such perfect ease. There are no long-winded analyses of character, but their place has been more than supplied by a thousand minute creative touches; and we feel that we know Mrs. Tulliver, and Maggie, and Tom, and Philip, much better than we know many of our most intimate friends,

There is yet to be mentioned the characteristic which, above all others or perhaps I ought to say, when combined with all the others-makes this work