to the novelist, in the play of elementary passions and in strong native developments of character.  It is true, also, that Thackeray approached “society” rather to satirize it than to set forth its agreeableness.  Yet, after all, it is “the great world” which he describes, that world upon which the broadening and refining processes of a high civilization have done their utmost, and which, consequently, must possess an intellectual interest superior to any thing in the life of London thieves, traveling showmen, and coachees.  Thackeray is the equal of Swift as a satirist, of Dickens as a humorist, and of Scott as a novelist.  The one element lacking in him—­and which Scott had in a high degree—­is the poetic imagination.  “I have no brains above my eyes” he said; “I describe what I see.”  Hence there is wanting in his creations that final charm which Shakspere’s have.  For what the eyes see is not all.

The great woman who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot was a humorist, too.  She had a rich, deep humor of her own, and a wit that crystallized into sayings which are not epigrams only because their wisdom strikes more than their smartness.  But humor was not, as with Thackeray and Dickens, her point of view.  A country girl, the daughter of a land agent and surveyor at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, her early letters and journals exhibit a Calvinistic gravity and moral severity.  Later, when her truth to her convictions led her to renounce the Christian belief, she carried into positivism the same religious earnestness, and wrote the one English hymn of the religion of humanity: 

  O, let me join the choir invisible, etc.

Her first published work was a translation of Strauss’s Leben Jesu, 1846.  In 1851 she went to London and became one of the editors of the Radical organ, the Westminster Review.  Here she formed a connection—­a marriage in all but the name—­with George Henry Lewes, who was, like herself, a freethinker, and who published, among other things, a Biographical History of Philosophy.  Lewes had also written fiction, and it was at his suggestion that his wife undertook story writing.  Her Scenes of Clerical Life were contributed to Blackwood’s Magazine for 1857, and published in book form in the following year. Adam Bede followed in 1859, the Mill on the Floss in 1860, Silas Marner in 1861, Romola in 1863, Felix Holt in 1866, and Middlemarch in 1872.  All of these, except Romola, are tales of provincial and largely of domestic life in the midland counties. Romola is an historical novel, the scene of which is Florence in the 15th century; the Florence of Macchiavelli and of Savonarola.