woman, who made small well-considered speeches on peculiar occasions, repeating them afterwards to her husband, and asking him if she had not spoken very properly”; and of her we see but little.  But of the eldest of the four, Mrs. Glegg, we see so much that we are really made quite uncomfortable by her; for she is a very formidable person indeed,—­ utterly without kindness, bullying everybody within her reach (her husband included), holding herself up as a model to everybody, and shaming all other families—­especially those into which she and her sisters had married—­by odious comparisons with the Dodsons.  All this we grant is very cleverly done.  The grim Mrs. Glegg and the fatuous Mrs. Tulliver and Mrs. Pullet talk admirably in their respective kinds; and we can quite believe that there are people who are not unfairly represented by the Dodsons—­with, the narrow limitation of their thoughts to their own little circle—­the extravagantly high opinion of their own vulgar family, with the corresponding depreciation of all in and about their own rank who do not belong to it—­their perfect conviction that their own family traditions (such as the copious eating of salt in their broth) are the standard of all that is good—­their consecration of all their most elevated feelings to the worship of furniture, and clothes, and table-linen, and silver spoons—­their utter alienation from all that, in the opinion of educated people, can make life fit to be enjoyed.  The humour of Mrs. Glegg’s determination that no ill desert of a relation shall interfere with the disposal of her property by will on the most rigidly Dodsonian principles of justice, according to the several degrees of Dodsonship, is excellent; and so is the change in her behaviour towards Maggie, whom, after having always bullied her, she takes up for the sake of Dodsondom’s credit when everybody else has turned against her....

[1] “Adam Bede,” i. 54.

The writer does not seem to be aware that the fools and bores of a book, while they bore the other characters, ought not to bore but to amuse the reader, and that they will become seriously wearisome to him if there be too much of them.  Shakespeare has contented himself with showing us his Dogberry and Verges, his Shallow and Slender, and Silence, to such a degree as may sufficiently display their humours; but he has not filled whole acts with them, and, even if he had, a five-act play is a small field for the display of prolix foolishness as compared with a three-volume novel.  Lord Macaulay has been supposed to speak sarcastically in saying that he “would not advise any person who reads for amusement to venture on a certain jeu d’esprit of Mr. Sadler’s as long as he can procure a volume of the Statutes at Large";[1] but we are afraid that we should not be believed if we were to mention the books to which we have had recourse by way of occasional relief from the task of perusing “George Eliot’s” tales.