be lost!  How many significant phrases would be lost from familiar language!  The commentaries of the authoress herself on the incidents of her tale give her works a value which inclines us to take up her volumes again and again, long after the stories themselves have become familiar.  We never weary of such sentences as the following from “Adam Bede”:  “There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.”  Not less beautiful and concentrated are those few words on woman’s love in “Middlemarch":—­“Those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own love.”

A faculty which George Eliot possessed in common with Dickens and Thackeray was that of making very ordinary people interesting.  And this is a talent characteristic of the best minds which have contributed to fiction or the drama.  Shakespeare possessed it in a high degree, and the best creations of Scott are ordinary, unheroic persons.  The faculty arises from superior powers of observation.  Some people will take a walk through a picturesque country or a crowded city without having seen any thing worthy of remark.  Others will pass over the same ground, and return overflowing with description.  In the same manner, the great number of men and women pass through life finding every thing commonplace, and the observing sympathy of a Thackeray, a Miss Austen, or a George Eliot is necessary to light up the unnoticed figures which throng the path.  George Eliot is particularly happy in drawing a really ordinary person, especially when a little pretension is added.  She must have written Mr. Brooke’s opinion of women with true enjoyment:  “There is a lightness about the feminine mind—­a touch and go—­music, the fine arts, that kind of thing—­they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.”  But though Mrs. Poyser be humble, she is far from ordinary.  “Some folks’ tongues,” she says, “are like the clocks as run on strikin’, not to tell you the time o’ the day, but because there’s summat wrong i’ their own inside.”

So long as George Eliot confined herself to her own sphere of action, she exhibited the same remarkable powers.  But even her great name could not command admiration for “The Spanish Gypsy.”  Her limitations clearly appeared in “Daniel Deronda.”  When describing the characters and intercourse of Grandcourt and Gwendolen, when dealing with every thing English in that variously estimated work, she remained the great author of “Adam Bede” and “Silas Marner.”  But in undertaking the discussion of the religion and social position of the Jews, she mistook her own talents, and created in Daniel Deronda, an indefinite combination of virtues unworthy of her genius.