I have, for example, a weakness of sympathy with that constant effort of George Eliot’s which plays through Adam Bede and Felix Holt and Tito Melema, through Daniel Deronda and through Lydgate in _Middlemarch_, through Maggie Tulliver, through Romola, through Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolen Harleth; the effort to show their adventures and their history—the author’s subject-matter all—as determined by their feelings and the nature of their minds. Their emotions, their stirred intelligence, their moral consciousness, become thus, by sufficiently charmed perusal, our own very adventure. The creator of Deronda and of Romola is charged, I know, with having on occasion—as in dealing with those very celebrities themselves—left the figure, the concrete man and woman, too abstract by reason of the quantity of soul employed; but such mischances, where imagination and humour still keep them company, often have an interest that is wanting to agitations of the mere surface or to those that may be only taken for granted. I should even like to give myself the pleasure of retracing from one of my own productions to another the play of a like instinctive disposition, of catching in the fact, at one point after another, from _Roderick Hudson_ to _The Golden Bowl_, that provision for interest which consists in placing advantageously, placing right in the middle of the light, the most polished of possible mirrors of the subject. Rowland Mallet, in _Roderick Hudson_, is exactly such a mirror, not a bit autobiographic or formally “first person” though he be, and I might exemplify the case through a long list, through the nature of such a “mind” even as the all-objective Newman in _The American_, through the thickly-peopled imagination of Isabel Archer in _The Portrait of a Lady_ (her imagination positively the deepest depth of her imbroglio) down to such unmistakable examples as that of Merton Densher in _The Wings of the Dove_, that of Lambert Strether in _The Ambassadors_ (_he_ a mirror verily of miraculous silver and quite pre-eminent, I think, for the connexion), and that of the Prince in the first half and that of the Princess in the second half of _The Golden Bowl_. I should note the extent to which these persons are, so far as their other passions permit, intense _perceivers_, all, of their respective predicaments, and I should go on from them to fifty other examples; even to the divided Vanderbank of _The Awkward Age_, the extreme pinch of whose romance is the vivacity in him, to his positive sorrow and loss, of the state of being aware; even to scanted Fleda Vetch in _The Spoils of Poynton_, through whose own delicate vision of everything so little of the human value of her situation is wasted for us; even to the small recording governess confronted with the horrors of _The Turn of the Screw_, and to the innocent child patching together all ineffectually those of _What Maisie Knew_; even in short, since I may