It was chiefly to provincial society, or to the humbler society of the country-side, that George Eliot kept in her earlier works; and it was there that she was ever best. The elaborate Dutch painting of _Silas Marner_ dealt sympathetically with the religious life of obscure sects; _The Mill on the Floss_ portrayed the humours of the lower middle class, and gave us a delightful study of the passionate and lovable ‘Maggie’; _Felix Holt_ dealt with country politics, though its best interest lay in the development of three wonderful characters--the agreeable Esther, the perplexed Felix, and the Dissenting minister who, in that old-world corner of England where the scene lay, had even in our own generation the dignity and quietude of an ancient Puritan emigrating beyond seas. Immense and always tender study of actual life was evident in these novels; and yet it did not require the publication of such a _tour de force_ as _Romola_, which, in 1863, followed _The Mill on the Floss_ and _Silas Marner_, to prove that the only novelist of quite the first rank who had arisen since Dickens and Thackeray was most powerful in work inspired by meditation and learning, rather than by observation, and that in that respect, as of course in many others, she differed absolutely from Dickens, whose strength lay in the observation of humanity, and from Thackeray, whose strength lay in the observation of ‘good society.’ If some works of George Eliot’s, of later date than _Romola_, remind us too often that their author, like the character in _Faust_, had _schrecklich viel gelesen_--that George Eliot was burdened with her learning--_Romola_ is a conspicuous example of the ‘talent that forms itself,’ not exactly ‘in solitude,’ yet by profound and continuous meditation. Like all the greater works of its writer, it is a study of the heart. And in _Romola_ the subtle wit of Italy is displayed, with curious variety of power, by a writer who had shown herself mistress, long before, of the blunter English humour.