CROSS'S 'LIFE'
73
written off in a fever of excitement, and stands now as at first written. But these items of interest are few and far between, and the book as a whole might more easily be the record of a savant than of a literary artist. In every way the total impression is sad and sombre. And so we lay down these volumes with the impression of a life disfigured by one great lapse that overshadowed it to the end, but ennobled by high gifts devoted with self-denying thoroughness to a lofty conception of the function of the depicter of human life. The novelist's art has never been made so sacramental as by George Eliot.
