So, in “Adam Bede” we have all the circumstances of Hetty’s seduction and the birth and murder of her illegitimate child; and in the “Mill on the Floss” there are the almost indecent details of mere animal passion in the loves of Stephen and Maggie.  If these are, as the writer’s more thorough-going admirers would tell us, the depths of human nature, we do not see what good can be expected from raking them up,—­not for the benefit of those whom the warnings may concern (for these are not likely to heed any warnings which may be presented in such a form), but for the amusement of ordinary readers in hours of idleness and relaxation.  Compare “Adam Bede” with that one of Scott’s novels which has something in common with it as to story—­the “Heart of Midlothian.”  In each a beautiful young woman of the peasant class is tried and condemned for child-murder; but, although condemned on circumstancial evidence under a law of peculiar severity, Effie Deans is really innocent, whereas Hetty Sorrel is guilty.  In the novel of the last generation we see little of Effie, and our attention is chiefly drawn to the simple heroism of her sister Jeanie.  In the novel of the present day, everything about Hetty is most elaborately described:  her thoughts throughout the whole course of the seduction, her misery on discovering that there is evidence of her frailty, her sufferings on the journey to Windsor and back (for it is the Edie and not the Jeanie of this tale that makes a long solitary journey to the south), her despairing hardness in the prison, her confession, her behaviour on the way to the gallows.  That all this is represented with extraordinary force we need not say; and doubtless the partisans of “George Eliot” would tell us that Scott could not have written the chapters in question.  We do not think it necessary to discuss that point, but we are sure that in any case he would not have written them, because his healthy judgment would have rejected such matters as unfit for the novelist’s art.

The boldness with which George Eliot chooses her subjects is very remarkable.  It is not that, like other writers, she fails in the attempt to represent people as agreeable and interesting, but she knowingly forces disagreeable people on us, and insists that we shall be interested in their story by the skill with which it is told.  Mr. Amos Barton, for instance, is as uninteresting a person as can well be imagined:  a dull, obtuse curate, whose poverty gives him no fair claim to pity; for he has entered the ministry of the English Church without any particular conviction of its superiority to other religious bodies; without any special fitness for its ministry; without anything of the ability which might reasonably entitle him to expect to rise; and without the private means which are necessary for the support of most married men in a profession which, if it is not (as it is sometimes called) a lottery, has very great inequalities of income,