Mr. Oscar Browning of Cambridge said that _Daniel Deronda_ was the climax, “the sun and glory of George Eliot’s art.” From that academic judgment I venture to dissent. It is a great book, no doubt, the work of a powerful intellect. But to me it was at the first reading, and is still, a tiresome book. Tediousness, which is a totally different thing from seriousness, is the unpardonable defect in a novel. It may be my own fault, but Deronda seems to me something of a prig. Now a man may be a prig without sin, but he ought not to take up too much room. Deronda takes up too much room. And Gwendolen Harleth, who dressed by preference in sea-green, seems to me to have a soul of the same colour—a psychological mermaid. She is unconvincing. I cannot love her. The vivid little Jewess, Mirah, is the only character with charm in the book. _Middlemarch_ is noteworthy for its extraordinary richness of human observation and the unexcelled truthfulness of some of its portraits. Mr. Isaac Casaubon is the living image of the gray-minded scholar and gentleman,—as delicately drawn as one of Miss Cecelia Beaux’ portraits of aged, learned, wrinkled men. Rosamund Vincy is the typical “daughter of the horse-leech” in respectable clothes and surroundings. Dorothea Brooke is one of George Eliot’s finest sacrificial heroines: “A perfect woman, nobly plann’d.” The book, as a whole, seems to me to have the defect of superabundance. There is too much of it. It is like one of the late William Frith’s large canvases, “The Derby Day,” or “The Railway Station.” It is constructed with skill, and full of rich material, but it does not compose. You cannot see the people for the crowd. Yet there is hardly a corner of the story in which you will not find something worth while. _Felix Holt, the Radical_ is marred, at least for me, by a fault of another kind. It is a novel of problem, of purpose. I do not care for problem-novels, unless the problem is alive, and even then I do not care very much for political economy in that form. It is too easy for the author to prove any proposition by attaching it to a noble character, or to disprove any theory by giving it an unworthy advocate. English radicalism of 1832 has quite passed away, or gone into the Coalition Cabinet. All that saves _Felix Holt_ now (as it seems to me, who read novels primarily for pleasure) is the lovely figure of Esther Lyon, and her old father, a preacher who really was good.