and within it she has shown herself the master of human motives and a consummate artist in portraying the soul.  She devotes the utmost care to describing some plain person who appears in her pages for but a moment, and is as much concerned that he shall be truly presented as if he were of the utmost consequence.  More than one otherwise very ordinary character acquires under this treatment of hers the warmest interest for the reader.  And she describes such persons, because their influence is subtle or momentous as it affects the lives of others.  Personages and incidents play a part in her books not for the sake of the plot or to secure dramatic unity, but for the sake of manifesting the soul, in order that the unfoldment of psychologic analysis may go on.  The unity she aims at is that of showing the development of the soul under influence of some one or more decisive impulses or as affected by given surroundings.  The lesser characters, while given a nature quite their own, help in the process of unfolding the personality which gives central purpose to each of her novels.  The influence of opposite natures on each other, the moulding power of circumstances, and especially the bearings of hereditary impulses, all play a prominent part in this process of psychologic analysis.

Through page after page and chapter after chapter she traces the feelings and thoughts of her characters.  How each decisive event appears to them is explained at length.  Moreover, the most trivial trait of character, the most incidental impulse, is described in all its particularity.  Through many pages Hetty’s conduct in her own bedroom is laid before the reader, and in no other way could her nature have been so brought to our knowledge.  Her shallow lightness of heart and her vanity could not be realized by ordinary intercourse with one so pretty and so bright; but George Eliot describes Hetty’s taking out the earrings given her by Arthur, and we see what she is.  The author seeks to open before us the inner life of that childish soul, and we see into its nature and realize all its capacities for good and evil.

Oh, the delight of taking out that little box and looking at the earrings!  Do not reason about it, my philosophical reader, and say that Hetty, being very pretty, must have known that it did not signify whether she had any ornaments or not; and that, moreover, to look at earrings which she could not possibly wear out of her bedroom could hardly be a satisfaction, the essence of vanity being a reference to the impressions produced on others; you will never understand women’s natures if you are so excessively rational.  Try rather to divest yourself of all your rational prejudices, as much as if you were studying the psychology of a canary-bird, and only watch the movements of this pretty round creature as she turns her head on one side with an unconscious smile at the earrings nestled in the little box.  Ah! you think, it is for the sake of the person who has