It seems strange that any reader of her books should have thought them the product of a man's brain, as was at first believed. For, notwithstanding her power in developing a plot, her breadth of view, and her mental grasp, her genius is essentially feminine. She excelled in analysis of character, in attention to details, in ethical teaching, and in artistic truthfulness, the qualities in which women have been pre-eminent. Only a woman's pen could have drawn such characters as Dinah Morris, Maggie Tulliver, and Dorothea Casaubon, or could have followed the minute and subtle influences under which the plot of _Middlemarch_ is shaped. George Eliot has left a larger portrait gallery of women than any other novelist. Not only has she drawn different grades of society, but, what is perhaps a more difficult task, she has drawn the different grades of spiritual greatness and moral littleness. She brought the psychological novel to a degree of perfection which has never been surpassed. Mrs. Oliphant has thus written of George Eliot's place in literature: "Another question which has been constantly put to this age, and which is pushed with greater zeal every day, as to the position of women in literature and the height which it is in their power to attain, was solved by this remarkable woman, in a way most flattering to all who were and are fighting the question of equality between the two halves of mankind; for here was visibly a woman who was to be kept out by no barriers, who sat down quietly from the beginning of her career in the highest place, and, if she did not absolutely excel all her contemporaries in the revelation of the human mind and the creation of new human beings, at least was second to none in those distinguishing characteristics of genius." We are too near the nineteenth century to decide as to the relative positions of its great novelists. At one time George Eliot was placed at the head of all writers of fiction, with Dickens and Thackeray as rivals for the second place. But she was dethroned by Thackeray, and there are signs that the final kingship will be given to Charles Dickens, unless Scott receives it instead. Fashions in novels change at least every fifty years. Exciting plots and situations, strong emotional scenes, sharp contrasts, are not demanded by present readers, who also turn away with disgust from the saintly heroine and the irreclaimable villain. Of the many volumes of fiction written in the eighteenth century only two are in general circulation to-day, _Robinson Crusoe_ and _The Vicar of Wakefield_. But all those once popular novels, even if their very names are now forgotten, have done their work in shaping the thought and morals of their own and succeeding generations. INDEX