The "Mill on the Floss" was soon followed by "Silas Marner," regarded by some as the gem of George Eliot's novels, and which certainly--though pathetic and sad, as all her novels are--does not leave on the mind so mournful an impression, since in its outcome we see redemption. The principal character--the poor, neglected, forlorn weaver--emerges at length from the Everlasting Nay into the Everlasting Yea; and he emerges by the power of love,--love for a little child whom he has rescued from the snow, the storm, and death. Driven by injustice to a solitary life, to abject penury, to despair, the solitary miser, gloating over his gold pieces,--which he has saved by the hardest privation, and in which he trusts,--finds himself robbed, without redress or sympathy; but in the end he is consoled for his loss in the love he bestows on a helpless orphan, who returns it with the most noble disinterestedness, and lives to be his solace and his pride. Nothing more touching has ever been written by man or woman than this short story, as full of pathos as "Adam Bede" is full of humor. What is remarkable in this story is that the plot is exactly similar to that of "Jermola the Potter," the masterpiece of a famous Polish novelist,--a marvellous coincidence, or plagiarism, difficult to be explained. But Shakspeare, the most original of men, borrowed some of his plots from Italian writers; and Mirabeau appropriated the knowledge of men more learned than he, which by felicity of genius he made his own; and Webster, too, did the same thing. There is nothing new under the sun, except in the way of "putting things." After the publication of the various novels pertaining to the rural and humble life of England, with which George Eliot was so well acquainted, into which she entered with so much sympathy, and which she so marvellously portrayed, she took a new departure, entering a field with which she was not so well acquainted, and of which she could only learn through books. The result was "Romola," the most ambitious, and in some respects the most remarkable, of all her works. It certainly is the most learned and elaborate. It is a philosophico-historical novel, the scene of which is laid in Florence at the time of Savonarola,--the period called the Renaissance, when art and literature were revived with great enthusiasm; a very interesting period, the glorious morning, as it were, of modern civilization.