20. +George Eliot’s Style.+-- Her style is everywhere pure and strong, of the best and most vigorous English, not only broad in its power, but often intense in its description of character and situation, and always singularly adequate to the thought. Probably no novelist knew the English character-- especially in the Midlands-- so well as she, or could analyse it with so much subtlety and truth. She is entirely mistress of the country dialects. In humour, pathos, knowledge of character, power of putting a portrait firmly upon the canvas, no writer surpasses her, and few come near her. Her power is sometimes almost Shakespearian. Like Shakespeare, she gives us a large number of wise sayings, expressed in the pithiest language. The following are a few:-- “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” “It is easy finding reasons why other people should be patient.” “Genius, at first, is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.” “Things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” “Nature never makes men who are at once energetically sympathetic and minutely calculating.” “To the far woods he wandered, listening, And heard the birds their little stories sing In notes whose rise and fall seem melted speech-- Melted with tears, smiles, glances-- that can reach More quickly through our frame’s deep-winding night, And without thought raise thought’s best fruit, delight.” TABLES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [Transcriber’s Note: In the original book, the following table-- spanning 14 pages-- was laid out in four columns: Writers; Works; Contemporary Events; Centuries (through 1500) or Decades (beginning 1550). Missing punctuation has been silently supplied.] +Centuries/Decades+ WRITERS Works Contemporary Events +500+ (_Author unknown._) +Beowulf+ (brought over by Saxons and Angles from the Continent). +600+ CAEDMON. A secular monk of Whitby. Died about +680+. +Poems+ on the Creation and other subjects taken from the Old and the New Testament. Edwin (of Deira), King of the Angles, baptised 627. +700+ BAEDA. +672-735+. “The Venerable Bede,” a monk of Jarrow-on-Tyne. An +Ecclesiastical History+ in Latin. A translation of +St John’s Gospel+ into English (lost). First landing of the Danes, 787. +800+ ALFRED THE GREAT. +849-901+. King; translator; prose-writer. Translated into the English of Wessex, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and other Latin works. Is said to have begun the +Anglo-Saxon Chronicle+. The University of Oxford is said to have been founded in this reign. Compiled by monks in various monasteries. +Anglo-Saxon Chronicle+, 875-1154. +900+ ASSER. Bishop of Sherborne. Died +910+. +Life of King Alfred+. +1000+ (_Author unknown._) A poem entitled +The Grave+. +1100+