of our modern “pre-Raphaelites.”  It is of these gentlemen—­who, by the way, in their reactionary affectations are the most entire opposites of the simple, unaffected, and forward-striving artists who really lived before Raphael—­it is of these gentlemen, with their choice of disagreeable subjects, uncomely models, and uncouth attitudes, their bestowal of superfluous labour on trifling details, and the consequent obtrusiveness of subordinate things so as to mar the general effect of the work, that “George Eliot” too often reminds us.

How very wearisome is the conversation of the clique of inferior women who worship Mr. Tryan! how dismally twaddling is that respectable old congregationalist, Mr. Jerome, with his tidy little garden and his “littel chacenut hoss”!  We feel for Mr. Tryan when in the society of such people, although to him it was mitigated by the belief that he was doing good by associating with them, and that by love of incense from any quarter which is described as part of his character.  But why should it be inflicted in such fearful doses on us, who have done nothing to deserve it, who have no “mission” to encounter it, and are entirely without Mr. Tryan’s consolations under the endurance of it?

Adam Bede’s mother is another sore trial of the reader’s patience—­with her endless fretful chatter, and all the details of her urging her sons, one after the other, to refresh themselves with cold potatoes:  nay, we are not reconciled to these vegetables even by the fact that on one occasion they are recommended as “taters wi’ the gravy in ’em."[1] But it is in “The Mill on the Floss” that the plague of tedious conversation reaches its height.  Mrs. Tulliver is one of four married sisters, whose maiden name had been Dodson, and in these sisters there is a studious combination of family likeness with individual varieties of character.  Mrs. Tulliver herself—­whose “blond” complexion is generally associated by our authoress with imbecility of mind and character—­belongs to that class of minds of which Mrs. Quickly may be considered as the chief intellectual type.  Mrs. Pullet—­the wife of a gentleman farmer, whose great characteristic is a habit of sucking lozenges, and whom Tom Tulliver most justly sets down as a “nincompoop”—­is almost sillier than Mrs. Tulliver.  She has the gift of tears ever ready to flow, and sheds them profusely on the anticipation of imaginary and ridiculous woes.  Her favourite vanity consists in drawing dismal pictures of the future and in priding herself on the bodily sufferings of her neighbours; that one had “been tapped no end o’ times, and the water—­they say you might ha’ swum in it if you’d liked”; that another’s “breath was short to that degree as you could hear him two rooms off”; and her highest religion—­ the loftiest exercise of her faith and self-denial—­is the accumulation of superfluous clothes and linen, in the hope that they may make a creditable display after her death.  Mrs. Deane is “a thin-lipped