The estimates given in these essays of the writings of Jane Austen, George Sand, Charlotte Brontë and Thackeray, show the soundness of George Eliot's critical judgment. She fully appreciated Jane Austen's artistic skill, as she did George Sand's impassioned love of liberty and naturalness. She also saw how tame are Miss Austen's scenes, how humanly imperfect are Thackeray's characters. Her own work is wanting in Jane Austen's artistic skill and finish, but there is far more of originality and character in her books, more of thought and purpose. Miss Austen tells her story wonderfully well, but her books are all on the same level of social mediocrity and flatness. No fresh, strong, natural, aspiring life is to be found in one of them. George Eliot has not Jane Austen's artistic skill, but she has thought, depth of purpose, originality of expression and conception, and a marvellous creative insight into character. She is less passionate and bold than George Sand, not the same daring innovator, more rational and sensible. She is not so much a poet, has little of George Sand's power of improvisation, much less of eloquence and abandon. She has more literary skill than Charlotte Brontë, less originality, but none of her crudeness. She has not so much of the subtle element of genius, but more of solidity and thought. Her theories concerning the novel place George Eliot fully in sympathy with what may very properly be called the British school of fiction. The natural history of man is the subject matter used by this school; and to describe accurately, minutely, some portion of the human race, some social community, is its main object. Richardson, Fielding, Miss Austen and Thackeray are the masters in this school, who have given direction to its aims and methods. They have sought to accomplish in novel-writing somewhat the same results as those aimed at by Wordsworth and Browning in poetry, to follow the natural, to make much of the common, to describe things as they are. They are realists both in method and philosophy, though differing widely from the minuteness and coarseness of Tourguénief and Zola, in that they show a large element of the ideal interfused with the real. This school is seldom coarse, vulgar or sensuous, does not mistake the depraved and beastly for the natural. Its members delight in simple scenes, plain life, common joys; the scenes, life and joys which are open to every Englishman. They have made use of the facts lying immediately about them, those with which they were the most familiar. They have broken away from the traditional theories of life, the manners of books of etiquette and the rules of fashionable society, for the life which is natural and instinct with impulses of its own. The life of the professions is described, local dialects and provincialisms appear, places and scenery are carefully painted, and the disagreeable and painful become elements in these novels, because common to humanity.