reforms of the day, in cultivated language.  He is high-minded and conscientious, but unpractical, and gets himself into difficulties, escaping penal servitude almost by miracle, for the crime of homicide.  The heroine, Esther Lyon, is supposed to be the daughter of a Dissenting minister, who talks theology after the fashion of the divines of the seventeenth century; unknown to herself, however, she is really the daughter of the heir of large estates, and ultimately becomes acknowledged as such, but gives up wealth and social position to marry Felix Holt, who had made a vow of perpetual poverty.  Such a self-renunciation is not common in England.  Even a Paula would hardly have accepted such a lot; only one inspired with the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius would be capable of such a willing sacrifice,—­very noble, but very improbable.

The most powerful part of the story is the description of the remorse which so often accompanies an illicit love, as painted in the proud, stately, stern, unbending, aristocratic Mrs. Transome.  “Though youth has faded, and joy is dead, and love has turned to loathing, yet memory, like a relentless fury, pursues the gray-haired woman who hides within her breast a heavy load of shame and dread.”  Illicit love is a common subject with George Eliot; and it is always represented as a mistake or crime, followed by a terrible retribution, sooner or later,—­if not outwardly, at least inwardly, in the sorrows of a wounded and heavy-laden soul.

No one of George Eliot’s novels opens more beautifully than “Felix Holt,” though there is the usual disappointment of readers with the close.  And probably no description of a rural district in the Midland Counties fifty years ago has ever been painted which equals in graphic power the opening chapter.  The old coach turnpike, the roadside inns brilliant with polished tankards, the pretty bar-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.