Page:Early Essays by George Eliot (1919).djvu/27

 carefully meditated, others apparently thrown off with the rapidity of inspiration; but in all of them there is a strange mixture of wisdom and whimsicality, of sublime conception and stinging caricature, of deep melancholy and wild merriment. No publisher would venture to offer such caviare to the general; and my friend's writings are not old and musty enough to fall within the scheme of any publishing club, so that the bulk of them will probably be their own tomb.

Meanwhile, among his other manuscripts, I have discovered three thick little volumes, which were successively carried in his pocket for the purpose of noting down casual thoughts, sketches of character, and scenes out of the common; in short, as receptacles of what would probably have evaporated in conversation had my friend been in the habit of companionship. From these fragmentary stores I shall now and then give a selection in some modest nook of an unpretending journal—not to the world, far be so ambitious an aspiration from me—but to the half-dozen readers who can be attracted by unsophisticated thought and feeling, even though it be presented to them in the corner of the weekly newspaper of their own petty town.

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