Now I do not know any more vivid way of bringing before you the precise work which English fiction is doing at the time George Eliot sets in, than by asking you to run your eye along the last four dates here given, 1827, 1837, 1847, 1857. Here, in 1827, advances a well-dressed man, bows a fine bow, and falls to preaching his gospel: "My friends, under whatever circumstances a man may be placed, he has it always in his power to be a gentleman;" and Bulwer's gentleman is always given as a very manful and Christian being. I am well aware of the modern tendency to disparage Bulwer, as a slight creature; but with the fresh recollection of his books as they fell upon my own boyhood, I cannot recall a single one which did not leave, as a last residuum, the picture in some sort of the chivalrous gentleman impressed upon my heart. I cheerfully admit that he sometimes came dangerously near snobbery, and that he was uncivil and undignified and many other bad things in the _New Timon_ and the Tennyson quarrel; and I concede that it must be difficult for us--you and me, who are so superior and who have no faults of our own--to look upon these failings with patience; and yet I cannot help remembering that every novel of Bulwer's is skilfully written and entertaining, and that there is not an ignoble thought or impure stimulus in the whole range of his works. But, advancing, here, in 1837, comes on a preacher who takes up the slums and raggedest miseries of London and plumps them boldly down in the parlors of high life; and, like the boy in the fairy tale whose fiddle compelled every hearer to dance in spite of himself, presently has a great train of people following him, ready to do his bidding in earnestly reforming the prisons, the schools, the workhouses, and the like, what time the entire train are roaring with the genialest of laughter at the comical and grotesque figures which this peculiar Dickens has fished up out of the London mud. But again: here, in 1847, we have Thackeray exposing shame and high vulgarity and minute wickedness, while Charlotte Bronte and Tennyson, with the widest difference in method, are for the first time expounding the doctrine of co-equal sovereignty as between man and woman, and bringing up the historic conception of the personality of woman to a plane in all respects level with, though properly differentiated from, that of man. It is curious to see the depth of Charlotte Bronte's adoration for Thackeray, the intense, high-pitched woman for the somewhat slack, and as I always think, somewhat low-pitched satirist; and perhaps the essential utterance of Thackeray, as well as the fervent tone which I beg you to observe is now being acquired by the English novel, the awful consciousness of its power and its mission, may be very sufficiently gathered from some of Charlotte Bronte's words about Thackeray which occur in the Preface to the second edition of her _Jane Eyre_: