Each of these groups has found special admirers among critics. George Eliot herself was disposed to prefer _Romola_ to all her other works; but she seems to have been swayed by the consideration that it had cost her more than any other book. _Romola_ has been praised also as a marvellous picture of Florentine life in the fifteenth century. Only men who are profoundly versed in Italian character, literature and history are entitled to pronounce upon the question; and they are few in number. But if the statement be true the fact is wonderful, for George Eliot had only spent about six weeks in Florence before she wrote the book. In any case it smells of the lamp, and we may therefore suspect that it will give less permanent pleasure than most of her novels. Tito Melema is admitted to be a masterpiece of subtle delineation; but for the most part the picture of Romola, her home and her associates, is laboured to a degree almost painful. Of the two other groups, if we take them as wholes, there can be little hesitation in assigning the palm to the earlier. The excellence here is evener, the artistic skill finer, the style more uniformly pleasing. The evenness of quality is proved by the fact that each work in turn has been praised as the author's best, or at least as equal to her best; whereas there can be no reasonable doubt about the pre-eminence of _Middlemarch_ in the last group. The artistic excellence, again, of _Silas Marner_, perhaps the most faultless (which does not necessarily mean the best) of English novels, is as conspicuous as are the artistic defects of _Middlemarch_. And as to style, nearly all readers have felt how the fresh, easy grace, the flexibility of language, the lightness of touch, gradually disappear from the works of George Eliot; and how in her later books passages of genuine eloquence, masterly dialogue or description or reflexion, are mingled with leaden paragraphs wherein the author seems to be struggling under a burden too great for her strength.