The artistic conception of the book is too slight and fragmentary, and it gives the impression of being unfinished in execution and desultory in purpose.  Yet there is in it much of fine feeling, pure sentiment, lively satire and apt wisdom.  Sometimes the thought is labored; but there is a wealth of clear-cut conviction, strong thoughts and rich experience.  There is force in the arguments, richness of ideas throughout, and a wonderful aptness of allusion and illustration.  Her culture and learning are everywhere apparent in the fine perception of the most exact analogies and in the ease with which she brings science to the support of morals.  Those of her admirers who come closest to her spirit, thoroughly appreciate her ideas, and delight in them, will read this book with satisfaction, and feel thankful that she wrote it.  No one who would know the mind of George Eliot can afford to overlook it.

When George Eliot writes on subjects involving a moral purpose or ideal, she is always wise and interesting.  When, however, she attempts to satirize some weakness or laugh at some folly, she is not always successful.  Rich as may be the satire and the wit of her novels, both are often heavy and dull in her essays.

The greater number of essays in this volume are devoted to the analysis of special types of character, but a few are given to moral problems.  These latter are of the more interest and value, and they present some new discussions of those problems with which George Eliot was so much fascinated.  Her earnest faith in altruism, realism, tradition, natural retribution and the social value of morality, is as distinct here as in her novels or poems.  In the essay on “False Testimonials” she gives a good realistic definition of imagination, which she says is “always based on a keen vision, a keen consciousness of what is, and carries the store of definite knowledge as material for the construction of its inward visions.”  She is no realist, however, in the sense of confining poetry merely to a photographic picture of outward nature.  She accepts Dante as a genuine realist, for “he is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction of actual objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginative combinations.”  She would have faithfulness to facts, but no limitation of vision; she would have the imagings exact and legitimate, but she would give our moral and intellectual insights no narrow bounds.  Her realism is well defined when she criticises one of those persons who take mere fancy for imagination, to whom all facts are unworthy of recognition.