which is very much more difficult than even the best prose,--the author's own prose. I shall indicate most of its merits and defects, great and small, if I say it is a romance,--a romance written by one who is emphatically a thinker. II. THE LEGEND OF JUBAL AND OTHER POEMS When the author of _Middlemarch_ published, some years since, her first volume of verse, the reader, in trying to judge it fairly, asked himself what he should think of it if she had never published a line of prose. The question, perhaps, was not altogether a help to strict fairness of judgment, but the author was protected from illiberal conclusions by the fact that, practically, it was impossible to answer it. George Eliot belongs to that class of pre-eminent writers in relation to whom the imagination comes to self-consciousness only to find itself in subjection. It was impossible to disengage one's judgment from the permanent influence of _Adam Bede_ and its companions, and it was necessary, from the moment that the author undertook to play the poet's part, to feel that her genius was all of one piece. People have often asked themselves how they would estimate Shakespeare if they knew him only by his comedies, Homer if his name stood only for the _Odyssey_, and Milton if he had written nothing but "Lycidas" and the shorter pieces. The question of necessity, inevitable though it is, leads to nothing. George Eliot is neither Homer nor Shakespeare nor Milton; but her work, like theirs, is a massive achievement, divided into a supremely good and a less good, and it provokes us, like theirs, to the fruitless attempt to estimate the latter portion on its own merits alone. The little volume before us gives us another opportunity; but here, as before, we find ourselves uncomfortably divided between the fear, on the one hand, of being bribed into favour, and, on the other, of giving short measure of it. The author's verses are a narrow manifestation of her genius, but they are an unmistakeable manifestation. _Middlemarch_ has made us demand even finer things of her than we did before, and whether, as patented readers of _Middlemarch_, we like "Jubal" and its companions the less or the more, we must admit that they are characteristic products of the same intellect. We imagine George Eliot is quite philosopher enough, having produced her poems mainly as a kind of experimental entertainment for her own mind, to let them commend themselves to the public on any grounds whatever which will help to illustrate the workings of versatile intelligence,--as interesting failures, if nothing better. She must feel they are interesting; an exaggerated modesty cannot deny that.