In laying down the book the reader is conscious of a different feeling from that with which he ordinarily parts with a work of fiction which has gratified his artistic tastes and furnished him with a high intellectual pleasure. Comparing the productions of George Eliot with those of other novelists, we are tempted to think of these as trivial fond records, which might well be blotted from the tablets of the memory, leaving the inscription she has placed there to live alone in ineffaceable characters. It is not that they show her to be endowed with a larger measure of those gifts which constitute the artist. In each of these she has perhaps been equaled or surpassed by one or another of her predecessors. As a painter of manners, of all that belongs to the surface of life, she is rivaled in fidelity, if not in breadth and force, by Fielding, Thackeray and Miss Austen. Her observation is less keen than theirs, her portraiture less vivid, her humor less cordial and abundant. Her conceptions have not the intensity of Charlotte Bronte's, nor her great scenes the dramatic fire of Scott's. In the minor matters of invention and plot she sometimes has recourse to shifts that betray the deficiencies they are intended to conceal. The quality in which she is supreme is one that lies beyond the strict domain of art. It is the power of penetrating to the roots of human character and action--a power which seems to be something more than insight, but for which sympathy would be a still less adequate term, indicating as it does a nature harmonious and complete, one in which intellect and feeling are resolved into an element that overflows and envelops its object without effort or repulsion. In other novelists we admire a subtlety that winds through the intricacies of motives, unmasking deceptions, revealing weaknesses and flaws but half suspected, or delicacies and beauties but half appreciated: George Eliot drops a plummet that sinks straight and steadily, through turbid waves and calm under-current, reaching depths before unexplored. We can claim no part in her discoveries, however our faculties may be exercised in grasping or in testing them. They more often correct than confirm our impressions; they make large additions to our knowledge; they suggest the necessity of reconstructing our theories and placing them on a new and wider base. A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary. By Mary Clemmer Ames. New York: Hurd & Houghton.