Before concluding our article we must notice the authoress’s views on two important subjects which enter largely into her stories—­love and religion.  That ladies, of their own accord and uninvited, fall in love with gentlemen is a common circumstance in novels written by ladies; and we are very much obliged to Madame D’Arblay, Miss Austen, and the other writers of the softer sex, who have let us into the knowledge of the important fact that such is the way in real life.  But the peculiarity of “George Eliot,” among English novelists, is that in her books everybody falls in love with the wrong person.  She seems to be continually on the point of showing us, with the author of “The Rovers”—­

  How two swains one nymph her vows may give,
  And how two damsels with one lover live.

Love is represented as a passion conceived without any ground of reasonable preference, and as entirely irresistible in its sway.  Tina bestows her affections on Captain Wybrow, while the Captain, without caring for anybody but himself, is paying his addresses to Miss Assher; and Mr. Gilfil is pining for Tina, whom, if he had any discernment at all, he could not but see to be quite unfitted for him.  Adam Bede is in love with the utterly undeserving Hetty, while Dinah Morris and Mary Burge are both in love with Adam, Hetty with Arthur Donnithorne, and Seth Bede with Dinah.  At last, Hetty is got out of the way, Dinah comes to a clearer understanding of her feelings towards Adam, and Adam, on being made aware of this, is set on by his mother to make a successful proposal; but “quiet Mary Burge” subsides into a bridesmaid, and Seth, the “poor wool-gatherin’ Methodist,” is left without any other consolation than that of worshipping his sister-in-law.

But it is in “The Mill on the Floss” that the unwholesome view which we have mentioned finds its most startling development.  Maggie is in love with Philip, and Philip with Maggie; Stephen Guest is in love with Lucy Deane, and Lucy with Stephen, while at the same time she has an undeclared admirer in Tom Tulliver.  But as soon as Maggie and Stephen become acquainted with each other, they exercise a powerful mutual attraction, and the mischief of love (as the passion is represented by our authoress) breaks loose in terrible force.  The reproach which Tom Tulliver had coarsely thrown in Philip’s teeth, that he had taken advantage of Maggie’s inexperience to secure her affections before she had had any opportunity of comparing him with other men, turns out to be entirely just.  Stephen is a mere underbred coxcomb, and is intended to appear as such (for we do not think that the authoress has failed in any attempt to make him a gentleman); his only merit, in so far as we can discover, is a foolish talent for singing, and, except as to person, he is infinitely inferior to Philip.  But for this mere physical superiority the lofty-souled Maggie prefers him to the lover whom she had before loved for his deformity; and the passion is represented as one which no considerations of moral or religious principle, no regard to the claims of others, no training derived from the hardships of her former life or from the ascetic system to which she had at one time been devoted, can withstand.  Here is a delicate scene, which is described as having taken place in a conservatory, to which the pair had withdrawn on the night of a ball:—­