The most amusing and finely-drawn character in this novel is a secondary one,—­Mrs. Poyser,—­but painted with a vividness which Scott never excelled, and with a wealth of humor which Fielding never equalled.  It is the wit and humor which George Eliot has presented in this inimitable character which make the book so attractive to the English, who enjoy these more than the Americans,—­the latter delighting rather in what is grotesque and extravagant, like the elaborate absurdities of “Mark Twain.”  But this humor is more than that of a shrewd and thrifty English farmer’s wife; it belongs to human nature.  We have seen such voluble sharp, sagacious, ironical, and worldly women among the farm-houses of New England, and heard them use language, when excited or indignant, equally idiomatic, though not particularly choice.  Strike out the humor of this novel and the interest we are made to feel in commonplace people, and the story would not be a remarkable one.

“Adam Bede” was followed in a year by “The Mill on the Floss,” the scene of which is also laid in a country village, where are some well-to-do people, mostly vulgar and uninteresting.  This novel is to me more powerful than the one which preceded it,—­having more faults, perhaps, but presenting more striking characters.  As usual with George Eliot, her plot in this story is poor, involving improbable incidents and catastrophes.  She is always unfortunate in her attempts to extricate her heroes and heroines from entangling difficulties.  Invention is not her forte; she is weak when she departs from realistic figures.  She is strongest in what she has seen, not in what she imagines; and here she is the opposite of Dickens, who paints from imagination.  There was never such a man as Pickwick or Barnaby Rudge.  Sir Walter Scott created characters,—­like Jeannie Deans,—­but they are as true to life as Sir John Falstaff.

Maggie Tulliver is the heroine of this story, in whose intellectual developments George Eliot painted herself, as Madame De Stael describes her own restless soul-agitations in “Delphine” and “Corinne.”  Nothing in fiction is more natural and life-like than the school-days of Maggie, when she goes fishing with her tyrannical brother, and when the two children quarrel and make up,—­she, affectionate and yielding; he, fitful and overbearing.  Many girls are tyrannized over by their brothers, who are often exacting, claiming the guardianship which belongs only to parents.  But Maggie yields to her obstinate brother as well as to her unreasonable and vindictive father, governed by a sense of duty, until, with her rapid intellectual development and lofty aspiration, she breaks loose in a measure from their withering influence, though not from technical obligations.  She almost loves Philip Wakem, the son of the lawyer who ruined her father; yet out of regard to family ties she refuses, while she does not yet repel, his love.  But her real passion is for Stephen Gurst, who was betrothed to her cousin, and who returned Maggie’s love with intense fervor.