of the author. On reading the 'Scenes,' and especially 'Adam Bede,' he was convinced that no one but a member of his own family could have written these stories. He recognised incidents, touches,

ng the outcry of neighbours who might not always feel that the

ll on the Floss.' How many joys and griefs of those happy careless days must have been recalled to her brother-those days when little Mary Ann had sat poring over Daniel Defoe's 'History of the Devil'-or sought refuge in the attic at Griff house, after a quarrel with him: "This attic was Maggie's favourite retreat on a wet day, when the weather was not too cold; here she fretted out all her ill-humours, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark rafters

." This was a favourite resort of Isaac and Mary Ann, as also of Tom and his sister when they went fishing together, and "Maggie thought it probable that the small fish would come to her hook and the large ones to Tom's." The "Red Dee

id in Lincolnshire. St. Oggs, with "its red-fluted roofs and broad warehouse gables," is the ancient town of Gainsborough. The Floss is a tidal river like the Trent, and in each c

s banks. The childhood of Tom and Maggie Tulliver is inextricably blended with this swift river, the traditions of which have been to them as fairy tales; its haunting presence is more or less with them throughout their chequered existence; and when pride and passion, when shame and sorrow have divided the brother and sister, pursued as by some tragic fate, the Floss seems to rise in sympathy, and submerges them in its mighty waters to unite them once more "in an emb

potent only in proportion as the individual finally issues conquered or a conqueror from the struggle of life. This action of character on circumstance, and of circumstance on character is an ever-recurring motif with George Eliot. We constantly see adverse circumstances modifying and moulding the lives of the actors in her stories. She has hardly, if ever, therefore, d

many-sidedness of life attracts by turns in the most opposite directions. Tom, on the other hand, with his narrow practical understanding, entirely concentrated on the business in hand, swerves neither to right nor left, because he may be said to resemble a horse with blinkers, in that he sees only the road straight ahead. Maggie, with all her palpable weaknesses and startling inconsistencies, is the most adorable of George El

ld unrest, her accidental reading of Thomas à Kempis forms a crisis in her life, by bringing about a spiritual awakening in which Christianity, for the first time, becomes a living truth to her. Intense as she is, Maggie now throws all the ardour of her nature into renunciation

ence of this enjoyment, yet the summer flowers and the summer sunshine put her scruples to flight. And then, when, through the intervention of Philip Wakem, the enchantments of romance and poetry are brought within her reach, the glory of the world again l

ogically true in George Eliot's studies of character than this love of the high-souled heroine for a man who has no corresponding fineness of fibre in his nature, his attraction lying entirely in the magnetism of mutual passion. This vitality places Maggie Tulliver by the side of the Juliets, the Mignons, the Consuelos, the Becky Sharps and other airy inheritors of immortality. It is curious that Mr. Swinburne, in view of such a character as this, or, indeed, bearing in mind a Silas Marner, a Dolly Winthrop, a Tito, and other intrinsically living reproductions of human nature, should describe George Eliot's as intellectually constructed characters in contrast to Charlotte Bront?'s creations, the former, according to him, being the result of intellect, the latter of genius. If ever character came simply dropped ou

e,' are cases in point. The 'Mill on the Floss' is a work of similar nature. Maggie Tulliver is George Eliot herself, but only one side, one portion, one phase of George Eliot's many-sided, vastly complex nature. It is George Eliot's inner life in childhood and youth as it appeared to her own consciousness. We recognise in it her mental acuteness, her clinging affectionateness, her ambition, her outlook beyond the present, her religious and moral preoccupations, even her genius is not so much omitted as left in an undeveloped, rudimentary state. While her make-believe stories, her thirst for knowledge, her spiritual wrestlings, and the passionate response of her soul to high thinking, noble music, and the beautiful in

nd positive on one point, namely, that he would punish everybody who deserved it: why, he wouldn't have minded being punished himself, if he deserved it; but, then, he never did deserve it." This strikes the key-note of a character whose stern inflexibility, combined with much practical insight and dogged persistence of effort, is at the same time di

d amusement of generations of readers. There is nothing grotesque, nothing exaggerated, in these humorous figures. The comic effect is not produced, as is often the case with the inventions of Dickens, by some set peculiarity of manner or trick of speech, more in the spirit of caricature. On the contrary, it is by a strict adherence to the just mean of nature, by a conscientious care not to overstep her probabilities, that we owe these matchless types of English provincial life. And the genuine humour of these types verges on the pathetic, in that the infinitely little of their lives is so magnified by them out of all proportion to its real importance. Mrs. Glegg, with her dictatorial ways, her small econom

ir prosaic respectability, is a nice question, which one is inclined to answer in the negative on readin

eet with a single remark from Mr. Glegg on which to exercise itself. But by-and-by it appeared that his silence wo

ears. If this is the way I'm to be treated, I'd better ha' known it before my poor father die

with any new amazement, but simply with that quiet, h

G., what hav

egg? done now? ...

pertinent answer, Mr. Gle

t to siding with everybody else against their own wives. Perhaps I'm wrong, and you can teach me better. But I've alla

rather warmly, for, though a kind man, he was not as m

as you make light of me, than try to make as everybody's in the right but me, and come to your breakfast in

ngry facetiousness. 'You're like a tipsy man a

ok very small, though you can't see yourself,' said Mrs. Glegg, in a tone of energe

me as if it was settled on her, and with a gig new stuffed and lined at no end o' expense, and provided for when I die beyond anything she could expect ... to go on i' this way, biting and snapping like a mad do

'But if you talk o' my being provided for beyond what I could expect, I beg leave to tell you as I'd a right to expect a many things as I don't find. And as

she was going to cry, and, breaking off

hoked voice, 'light a fire upstairs, and put the blinds down. Mr. Gle

lliver, the headstrong, violent, but withal generous, father of Maggie, and his sister Mrs. Moss, whose motherliness and carelessness of appearances form a striking foil to the Dodson sisters. Indeed, 'The Mill on the Floss' is so rich in minor character

in a certain passionate glow of youth, which emanates from the heroine, and seems to warm the story through and through. Fo