If the critics are right in pronouncing _Adam Bede_ artistically defective, it is not difficult to see that there is still less of unity in _The Mill on the Floss_. Unconnected and unnecessary scenes and persons abound, while the Tulliver and Dodson families, and their stupidities, are described at a tedious length. Yet the picture of child-life given here compensates for all we might complain of in other directions. Maggie is an immortal child, wonderfully drawn, out of the very heart of nature herself. Her joy in life, her doubts and fears, her conflicts with self, are delineated with a master's hand, and justify--such is their faithfulness to child-life--the supposition that this is George Eliot's own childhood, so delicate and penetrating is the insight of this description, Swinburne has justly said that "no man or woman, outside the order of poets, has ever written of children with such adorable fidelity of affection as the spiritual mother of Totty, Eppie and of Lillo." Nor have the poets surpassed her in truthfulness to child-life and intuitive insight into child-nature. The child Maggie is unsurpassed, not as an ideal being, but as a living child that plays in the dirt, tears her frocks, and clips her hair in an hour of childish anger. In this novel we first come distinctly upon another element in the writings of George Eliot, and this is a yearning after a fuller, larger life. It does not appear as distinctly developed in _Adam Bede_, where there is more of poise and repose. Maggie represents the restless spirit of the nineteenth century, intense dissatisfaction with self, and a profoundly human passion for something higher and diviner. A passionate restlessness and a profound spiritual hunger are united in this novel to an eager desire for a deeper and fuller life, and for a satisfactory answer to the soul's spiritual thirst. The spiritual repose of Dinah, who has found all the religious cravings of her nature satisfied in Methodism, is abandoned for the inward yearning of Maggie, whose passionate search for spiritual truth ends in disaster.