It may be that those smoother and more refined circles in which everything is cut, more or less, to an artificial and uniform pattern, and where few things are more dreaded than the imputation of oddity, present less attractive matter to an original artist since one modern drawing-room scene and conversation may be and is multiplied by fifty in our popular novels with but very slight modifications. And here, we need hardly say, the peculiar and inimitable force with which, avoiding anything like caricature, “George Eliot” brings before us the characteristics of English middle-class life is fully exemplified. The course of the story takes us very much into the borough town of Middlemarch, and the provincial magnates who make up society there. But thorough justice will not have been done to the work until it has been read through a second time as a whole-an experiment which very few will grudge to make. Regarded in this point of view, each “book” of Middlemarch is complete in itself.

If any work of fiction can bear the being read in portions without injury to its effect, it is one which, like the present, is really not so much a novel as a narrative which is made the vehicle of careful studies of character, fine and discriminating satire, and original thought clothed in the most finished and epigrammatic language. It is difficult to say how far the large circle of readers who hailed with keen delight the announcement of a new novel by “George Eliot,” will be satisfied with that writer for having adopted the tantalising expedient of issuing by instalments-a single “book” at a time.

Middle march author