George Eliot's place is certainly among the great novelists. At the lowest, she is classed after Scott, Dickens and Thackeray (and a few might add Jane Austen); at the highest, she is placed above them all. She carried by storm the intellect of one of the most thoughtful and weighty of critics, Edmond Scherer, who in his _Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine_ devoted three essays to her, which have been admirably translated by Professor Saintsbury. In the last of these Scherer goes so far as to say that for her 'was reserved the honour of writing the most perfect novels yet known.' In spite of the note of exaggeration this judgment is significant. Only a writer, not merely of genius, but of great genius, could have drawn it from a critic so sober-minded; a foreigner, unbiassed by the predilections of patriotism; a man of wide knowledge, well aware of all that his sweeping assertion implied. Most writers, even the greatest, have loaded themselves with a weight of literary lumber. George Eliot carries less of such _impedimenta_ than many, but it will be well nevertheless to put aside at once such works as are neither in her special field nor in her best manner. Under this head fall the heavy and laboured volume of essays entitled _Impression of Theophrastus Such_, and also the poems. The latter, thoughtful, and occasionally eloquent, nevertheless prove that the writer had not the gift of verse. Richard Congreve described _The Spanish Gypsy_ as 'a mass of positivism.' The description is accurate; and perhaps the fact that it is so is, to others who are not positivists, a heavier objection than it was to him. _The Legend of Jubal_, though better, is not great poetry. Leaving these works then aside, the novels of George Eliot fall pretty clearly into three groups, which conform to the divisions of chronology. In the first we have at one extreme the _Scenes of Clerical Life_, and at the other _Silas Marner_; in the second _Romola_ stands alone; in the third, _Felix Holt_, the weakest if not the least readable of all, is transitional; while _Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_ illustrate her later manner respectively in full flower and in decay.