[406] _Sketches and Travels_: in London, 268. Cf. Taine’s comment that Thackeray “does as a novelist what Hobbes does as a philosopher. Almost everywhere, when he describes fine sentiments, he derives them from an ugly source.” _Hist. of Eng. Lit._, IV, 188. [407] “Of this national disease, this indifference to reality, the main bulk of nineteenth century English fiction has died already or must soon be dead.” Gosse: _Eng. Lit. in the Nineteenth Cent._ 221. [408] _Letters_, I, 156. [409] _Godolphin_, 106–7. Cf. _Pelham_, 106 ff. for a long discussion of the novel. [410] _Autobiography_, 206. But on another page he describes the sense of intimate reality he had of his beloved Barsetshire, and how vivid was the mental map he had made of it. [411] _Diana of the Crossways_, 275. [412] _The Egoist_, 2. [413] _Adam Bede_, I, 268. [414] _History of English Literature_, V, 140. [415] _Middlemarch_, II, 275. In this story also occurs the exquisite passage on the theme of the second citation above: “If we had a keen feeling and vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like seeing the grass grow and hearing the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” [416] _Daniel Deronda_, III, 79. [417] One of her biographers, G. W. Cooke, evidently holding to the old idea of satire, makes the opposite deduction, that “she is too much in sympathy with human nature to laugh at its follies and its weaknesses. * * * The foibles of the world she cannot treat in the vein of the satirist.” Not if this vein be restricted to the Juvenalian and Popeian types, certainly. [418] _Letters_, II, 535. [419] A description of this youth concludes with a most significant epigram: “He was one of those who delight to dally with gentleness and faith, * * * but the mere suspicion of coquetry and indifference plunged him into a fury of jealous wrathfulness, and tossed so desirable an image of beauty before him that his mad thirst to embrace it seemed love. By our manner of loving we are known.” _Vittoria_, 378. [420] _An Amazing Marriage_, 511. He adds, “Character must ever be a mystery, only to be explained in some degree by conduct; and that is very dependent upon accident.” [421] _The Egoist_, 4. It is in this connection that comedy “watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod.” And it is at the end of the same story that she is “grave and sisterly” toward Clara and Vernon, though when she regards certain others, “she compresses her lips.” [422] _Diana_, 429. This is where Meredith and Browning are at one;--not only in the obvious resemblance of a cramped and obscure style, but in the agreement as to a fundamental idea--that the justification of love lies in its intellectual companionship and spiritual inspiration. [423] _One of Our Conquerors_, 340. [424] _Evan Harrington_, 343.