that her hair may have no chance of appearing in curls on a great occasion (according to her mother’s wish), Maggie plunges her head into a basin of water.  On getting an old dress and a bonnet from her unloved aunt Glegg, she bastes the frock along with the roast beef on the following Sunday, and souses the bonnet under the pump.  In consequence of the continual remarks of her mother and aunts, about the un-Dodsonlike colour of her hair, she cuts it all off.  She makes the most deplorable exhibition of her literary vanity at every turn.  Out of spite she pushes her cousin Lucy, when arrayed in the prettiest of dresses, into the “cow-trodden mud,” and thereupon she runs off to a gang of gipsies, with the intention of becoming their queen,—­an adventure from which we are glad that she is allowed to escape with less of suffering than Miss Edgeworth might perhaps have felt it a matter of duty to inflict on her.  For the Toms and Maggies, the Franks and Rosamonds, of real life, such monitory anecdotes as these may be very good and useful; but it seems to us that they are out of place in a book intended for readers who have got beyond the early domestic schoolroom.

We cannot praise the construction of these tales.  The plots are very slight; the narrative drags painfully in some parts, and in other parts the authoress has recourse to very violent expedients, as where she brings in the “startling Adelphi stage-effect” of the flood to drown Tom and Maggie, in order to escape from the unmanageable complication of her story.  Both in “Adam Bede” and in “The Mill on the Floss” the chief interest is over long before the tale comes to an end; and in looking at the whole series together we see something of repetition.  Thus, both Tina and Hetty set their hearts on a young man above their own position, and turn a deaf ear to a longer-known, more suitable, and worthier suitor.  Each disappears at a critical time, and each, after a disappointment in the higher quarter, falls back on a marriage with the humbler admirer; with the difference, however, that, as Hetty had committed murder, and as Tina had just been saved from doing so, the marriage in the first case never actually takes place, and in the second it ends after a few months.  And as a smaller instance of repetition, we may compare the bedroom visit of the seraphic Dinah Morris to the earthly Hetty with that of the pattern Lucy Deane to the tempestuous Maggie Tulliver.

There is less of affectation in these books than in most of our recent novels, yet there is by far too much.  Among the portions which are most infected by this sin we may mention the description of scenery,—­thanks, doubtless, in no small measure, to the influence of that very dangerous model Mr. Ruskin....