She did not write mechanically, as a person grinds at a mill.  Nor was she greedy of money, to be spent in running races with the rich.  She was a conscientious writer from first to last.  Yet “Middlemarch,” with all the labor spent upon it, has more faults than any of her preceding novels.  It is as long as “The History of Sir Charles Grandison;” it has a miserable plot; it has many tedious chapters, and too many figures, and too much theorizing on social science.  Rather than a story, it is a panorama of the doctors and clergymen and lawyers and business people who live in a provincial town, with their various prejudices and passions and avocations.  It is not a cheerful picture of human life.  We are brought to see an unusual number of misers, harpies, quacks, cheats, and hypocrites.  There are but few interesting characters in it:  Dorothea is the most so,—­a very noble woman, but romantic, and making great mistakes.  She desires to make herself useful to somebody, and marries a narrow, jealous, aristocratic pedant, who had spent his life in elaborate studies on a dry and worthless subject.  Of course, she awakes from her delusion when she discovers what a small man, with great pretensions, her learned husband is; but she remains in her dreariness of soul a generous, virtuous, and dutiful woman.  She does not desert her husband because she does not love 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.”