Life of Burns; and the shortest is the best, in spite of defects which would only have been worse if the book had been bigger.  It is to be feared that, conscientious and honourable as his self-denial has been, even Mr. Cross has not wholly resisted the natural and besetting error of the biographer.  Most people will think that the hundred pages of the Italian tour (vol. ii.), and some other not very remarkable impressions of travel, might as well or better have been left out.

As a mere letter-writer, George Eliot will not rank among the famous masters of what is usually considered especially a woman’s art.  She was too busy in serious work to have leisure for that most delightful way of wasting time.  Besides that, she had by nature none of that fluency, rapidity, abandonment, pleasant volubility, which make letters amusing, captivating, or piquant.  What Mr. Cross says of her as the mistress of a salon, is true of her for the most part as a correspondent:—­’Playing around many disconnected subjects, in talk, neither interested nor amused her much.  She took things too seriously, and seldom found the effort of entertaining compensated by the gain’ (iii. 335).  There is the outpouring of ardent feeling for her friends, sobering down, as life goes on, into a crooning kindliness, affectionate and honest, but often tinged with considerable self-consciousness.  It was said of some one that his epigrams did honour to his heart; in the reverse direction we occasionally feel that George Eliot’s effusive playfulness does honour to her head.  It lacks simplicity and verve.  Even in an invitation to dinner, the words imply a grave sense of responsibility on both sides, and sense of responsibility is fatal to the charm of familiar correspondence.

As was inevitable in one whose mind was so habitually turned to the deeper elements of life, she lets fall the pearls of wise speech even in short notes.  Here are one or two:—­

’My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise with individual suffering and individual joy.’

’If there is one attitude more odious to me than any other of the many attitudes of “knowingness,” it is that air of lofty superiority to the vulgar.  She will soon find out that I am a very commonplace woman.’

’It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.’

The following is one of the best examples, one of the few examples, of her best manner:—­