The place which Mrs. Lewes thus so suddenly won, she has, of course, always maintained. Her position of absolute supremacy over all other women writers in England is something peculiar and curious. She is first--and there is no second. No living authoress in Britain is ever now compared with her. I read, not long since, in a New York paper, a sentence which spoke of George Eliot and Miss Mulock as being the greatest English authoresses in the field of fiction. It seemed very odd and funny to me. Certainly, an English critic would never have thought of bracketing together such a pair. Miss Mulock is a graceful, true-hearted, good writer; but Miss Mulock and George Eliot! Robert Lytton and Robert Browning! "A. K. H. B." (I think these are the initials) and John Stuart Mill! Mark Lemon's novels and Charles Dickens's! Mrs. Lewes has made people read novels who perhaps never read fiction from any other pen. She has made the novel the companion and friend and study of scholars and thinkers and statesmen. Her books are discussed by the gravest critics as productions of the highest school of art. Men and journals which have always regarded, or affected to regard, Thackeray as a mere cynic, and Dickens as little better than a professional buffoon, have discussed "The Mill on the Floss" and "Romola" as if these novels were already classic. Of course it would be a very doubtful kind of merit which commanded the admiration of literary prigs or pedants; but that is not the merit of George Eliot. Her books find their way to all hearts and intelligences, but it is their peculiarity that they compel, they extort the admiration of men who would disparage all novels, if they could, as frivolous and worthless, but who are forced even by their own canons and principles to recognize the deep clear thought, the noble culture, the penetrating, analytical power, which are evident in almost every chapter of these stories. Most of our novelists write in a slipslop, careless style. Dickens is worthless, if regarded merely as a prose writer; Trollope hardly cares about grammar; Charles Reade, with all his masculine force and clearness, is terribly irregular and rugged. The woman writers have seldom any style at all. George Eliot's prose might be the study of a scholar anxious to acquire and appreciate a noble English style. It is as luminous as the language of Mill; far more truly picturesque than that of Ruskin; capable of forcible, memorable expression as the robust Saxon of Bright. I am not going into a criticism of George Eliot, who has been, no doubt, fully criticised in America already. I am merely engaged in pointing out the special reasons why she has won in England a certain kind of admiration which, it seems to me, hardly any novelist ever has had before. I think she has infused into the novel some elements it never had before, and so thoroughly infused them that they blend with all the other materials, and do not form anywhere a solid