As for her _Romola_, I find it almost an elaborate failure in the endeavor to create the atmosphere of the period of Savonarola--that amazing age when the greatest spirits of the world were alive and producing works of unsurpassable genius--and in her too anatomical demonstration of the varying vices and virtues of Tito: for she has none of that strange subtlety that a writer of novels must possess to delineate how this human soul may pass in the course of decomposition into some irremediable ruin. She is too much of the moralist to be able to present this character as a necessary and natural figure, such as far greater writers have had no difficulty in doing. She presents him--rather after the fashion of George Sand, as a fearful and warning example. Think, for a moment,--the comparison is all but impossible,--of this attempt at characterization with Browning's Guido Franceschini; for in his two monologues every nerve of the mind is touched by the patient scalpel, every joint and vein of the subtle and intricate spirit laid bare and divided. Compare this also with Cenci: the comparison has been made by Swinburne, with an equal praise of two masterpieces, _The Cenci_ of Shelley and _The Ring and the Book_ of Browning. Both Cenci and Franceschini are cunningly drawn and colored so as to be absolute models of the highest form of realism: as cunningly colored and drawn as the immortal creation of Madame Bovary. Take, for instance, the character of Rochester in _Jane Eyre._ It is incomparable of its kind; an absolutely conceived living being, who has enough nerves and enough passion to more or less extinguish the various male characters in George Eliot's novels. That Maggie Tulliver, in _The Mill on the Floss_, the finest of her novels, can be moved to any sense but that of bitter disgust and sickening disdain by a thing--I will not write, a man--of Stephen Guest's character, is a lamentable and an ugly case of shameful failure; for as Swinburne says, "The last word of realism has surely been spoken, the last abyss of cynicism has surely been sounded and laid bare." And I am glad to note here that he dismisses her with this reference to three great French writers; using, of course, his invariable ironical paradoxes. "For a higher view and a more cheery aspect of the sex, we must turn back to those gentler teachers, those more flattering painters of our own--Laclos, Stendhal and Merrimée; we must take up _La Double Méprise_--or _Le Rouge et le Noir_--or _Les Liaisons Dangereuses._"