"Yet if your graciousness will not disdain A poor plucked songster, shall he sing to you? _Some lay of afternoons,--some ballad strain Of those who ached once, but are sleeping now Under the sun-warmed flowers?_" Juan's link of connection with the story is, in the first place, that he is in love with Fedalma, and, in the second, as a piece of local colour. His attitude with regard to Fedalma is indicated with beautiful delicacy:-- "O lady, constancy has kind and rank. One man's is lordly, plump, and bravely clad, Holds its head high, and tells the world its name: Another man's is beggared, must go bare, And shiver through the world, the jest of all, But that it puts the motley on, and plays Itself the jester." Nor are his merits lost upon her, as she declares, with no small force,-- "No! on the close-thronged spaces of the earth A battle rages; Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand,-- Nor shrink, and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another. O, 'tis written large, The thing I have to do. But you, dear Juan, Renounce, endure, are brave, unurged by aught Save the sweet overflow of your good-will." In every human imbroglio, be it of a comic or a tragic nature, it is good to think of an observer standing aloof, the critic, the idle commentator of it all, taking notes, as we may say, in the interest of truth. The exercise of this function is the chief ground of our interest in Juan. Yet as a man of action, too, he once appeals most irresistibly to our sympathies: I mean in the admirable scene with Hinda, in which he wins back his stolen finery by his lute-playing. This scene, which is written in prose, has a simple realistic power which renders it a truly remarkable composition. Of the different parts of _The Spanish Gypsy_ I have spoken with such fullness as my space allows: it remains to add a few remarks upon the work as a whole. Its great fault is simply that it is not a genuine poem. It lacks the hurrying quickness, the palpitating warmth, the bursting melody of such a creation. A genuine poem is a tree that breaks into blossom and shakes in the wind. George Eliot's elaborate composition is like a vast mural design in mosaic-work, where great slabs and delicate morsels of stone are laid together with wonderful art, where there are plenty of noble lines and generous hues, but where everything is rigid, measured, and cold,--nothing dazzling, magical, and vocal. The poem contains a number of faulty lines,--lines of twelve, of eleven, and of eight syllables,--of which it is easy to suppose that a more sacredly commissioned versifier would not have been guilty. Occasionally, in the search for poetic effect, the author decidedly misses her way:-- "All her being paused In resolution, _as some leonine wave_," etc.