Moreover, it is country life seen through the medium of a powerful and right-judging personality.

It is her intimate and thorough knowledge of big things and small, of literature and damson cheese, enabling her and us to see all round her characters, that provides these characters with their ample background of light and shade.
It is well to realise that since George Eliot's day the fashion of writing, the temper of the modern mind, are quite changed; it is a curious fact that the more sophisticated we become the simpler grows our speech.

Nowadays we talk as nearly as we may in words of one syllable.
Our style is stripped more and more of its Latinity.

Our writers are more and more in love with French methods--with the delicate clearness of short phrases in which every word tells; with the rejection of all intellectual ambulations round about a subject.

To the fanatics of this modern method the style of George Eliot appears strange, impossible.