and at last pedantic; and the ethical purpose was sometimes more visible than the ethical life.  In the French drama Corneille had great conceptions, noble types of character, stately verse, and tragic situations; but English readers too often find him mannered, artificial, dull.  Corneille, I freely admit, is not Shakespeare:  I greatly prefer Shakespeare; but I prefer Corneille to Ibsen.  We have plenty of Ibsenites to-day, and rather a plethora than a dearth of ignoble creatures in squalid situations who expose to us their mean lives with considerable truth to nature.  In such an age, it is just as well that the lessons of Adam Bede, Romola, Fedalma and Zarca, should not be quite forgotten.

The art of romance, in the widest and loftiest sense of the term, is even yet in its infancy.  Ancient literature, mediaeval literature, knew nothing of it.  Nor indeed did modern literature entirely conceive it in all its fulness until the days of Le Sage, Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith.  Nay, we may say that its power was not quite revealed before Scott, Goethe, Manzoni, Jane Austen, Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, and George Sand.  Its subtlety, its flexibility, its capacity for analytic research, its variety of range, and facility for reaching all hearts and all minds—­all this is simply incalculable.  And we may be sure that the star of romance has not yet reached its zenith.  It is the art of the future—­and an art wherein women are quite as likely to reign as men.  It would be treason to Art to pretend that George Eliot came near to such perfection.  But she had certain qualities that none of her predecessors had quite possessed, and she strove for an ideal which may one day become something more than a dream—­a dream that as yet eludes and escapes from the mind as it struggles to grasp it and to fix it.