A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium, and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English.  But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.  We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house.  I, at least, have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. [Footnote:  Middlemarch, chapter XV.]

She does not ramble away from her subject, it is true; but she likes to pause often to discuss the doings of her personages, and to pour forth some tender or noble thought.  To many of her readers these bits of wisdom and of sentiment are among the most valuable portions of her books, when taken in their true environment in her pages.  She has a purpose larger than that of telling a story or of describing the loves of a few men and women.  She seeks to penetrate into the motives of life, and to reveal the hidden springs of action; to show how people affect each other; how ideas mould the destinies of the individual.  To do all this in that large, artistic spirit she has followed, requires that there shall be something more than narration and conversation.  That she has now and then commented unnecessarily, and in a too-learned manner, is a very small detraction from the interest of her books.

In Adam Bede she turns aside for a whole chapter to defend her method of depicting accurately, minutely, in the simplest detail, the feelings, motives, actions and surroundings of very commonplace and uninteresting people.  Her reasons for this method in novel-writing apply to all her works, and are worthy of the author of Adam Bede and Silas Marner.

I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields—­on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.