Psychologic analysis seems out of place in a novel, but with George Eliot it is a chief purpose of her writing. She lays bare the soul, opens its inmost secrets, and its anatomy is minutely studied. She devotes more space to the inner life and character of her personalities than to her narratives and conversations. She traces some of her characters through a long process of development, and shows how they are affected by the experiences of life. Her more important characters grow up under her pen, develop under the influence of thought or sorrow. Novelists usually carry their characters through their pages on the same level of mind and life; and George Eliot not only does this with her uncultured characters, but she also shows the soul in the process of unfolding or expanding. None of her leading characters are at the end what they were in the beginning; with the most subtle power she traces the growth of Tito Melema's mind through its perilous descent into selfish corruption, and with equal or even greater skill she unfolds the history of Daniel Deronda's development under the impulse to find for himself a life-mission. In this direction George Eliot is always great. Her skill is remarkable, albeit she has not sounded either the highest or the lowest ranges of human capacity. The range within which her studies are made is a wide one, however, and within it she has shown herself the master of human motives and a consummate artist in portraying the soul. She devotes the utmost care to describing some plain person who appears in her pages for but a moment, and is as much concerned that he shall be truly presented as if he were of the utmost consequence. More than one otherwise very ordinary character acquires under this treatment of hers the warmest interest for the reader. And she describes such persons, because their influence is subtle or momentous as it affects the lives of others. Personages and incidents play a part in her books not for the sake of the plot or to secure dramatic unity, but for the sake of manifesting the soul, in order that the unfoldment of psychologic analysis may go on. The unity she aims at is that of showing the development of the soul under influence of some one or more decisive impulses or as affected by given surroundings. The lesser characters, while given a nature quite their own, help in the process of unfolding the personality which gives central purpose to each of her novels. The influence of opposite natures on each other, the moulding power of circumstances, and especially the bearings of hereditary impulses, all play a prominent part in this process of psychologic analysis.