[1] “Miscellaneous Writings,” ii. 68.

In the case of “these emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers,” the authoress again defends her principle.  “I share with you,” she says, “the sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie."[2] We must confess that we care very little for Tom and Maggie, who, although the inscription on their tombstone and the motto on the title-page of the book tell us that “in their death they were not divided,” do not strike us as having been “lovely and pleasant in their lives.”  We do not think the development of the brother and the sister a matter of any great interest; and, if it were, we believe that a sufficient ground might have been laid for our understanding it without so severely trying our patience by the details of the “sordid life” amid which their early years were spent.

[2] “The Mill on the Floss,” ii. 150.

Another mistake, as it appears to us, is the too didactic strain into which the authoress occasionally falls—­writing as if for the purpose of forcing lessons on children or the poor, rather than for grown-up and educated readers.  The story of “Janet’s Repentance” might, with the omission of a few passages such as the satirical flings at Mr. Tryan’s female worshippers, be made into a very edifying little tract for some “evangelical” society.  Mr. Tryan’s opponents are all represented as brutes and monsters, drunkards and unclean, enemies of all goodness; while, with the usual unscrupulousness of party tract-writers, we are required to choose between an alliance with such infamous company and unreserved adhesion to the Calvanistic curate, without being allowed any possibility of a third course.  And, in addition to Mr. Tryan’s victory, there is the conversion of Mrs. Dempster, not only from drunkenness to teetotalism (which might form the text for a set of illustrations by Mr. Cruikshank, in the moral style of his later days), but from hatred to love of the Gospel according to Mr. Tryan.  In its place we should not care to object to such a story, or to a great deal of the needless talk which it contains both of sinners and of saints; but we do object to it in a book which is intended for the lighter reading of educated people, and the more so because we know that it comes from a writer who can feel nothing of the bitter but conscientious bigotry which the composition of such a story in good faith implies....

In reading of Maggie’s early indiscretions, we—­hardened, grey-headed reviewers as we are—­feel something like a renewal of the shame and mortification with which, long decades of years ago, we read of the weaknesses of Frank and Rosamond,—­as if we ourselves were the little girl who made the mistake of choosing the big, bright-coloured bottle from the chemist’s window, or the little boy who allowed himself to be deceived by the flattery of the lady in the draper’s shop.  In order