Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/49

 deal with phases of literary life which have been the object of George Eliot's mature and conscious observation. It would seem that the novelist's plastic period closes at an early age: Dickens was never at home with railways, George Eliot as an artist feels strange after the Reform Bill is passed. Of later London life she has, no doubt, been an observant spectator, but there is the greatest possible difference shown in the reproductions in her earliest and latest work: spontaneous art in the Scenes of Clerical Life, conscious effort in these Sketches of Literary Life. And in her latest book the nearest approach to the manner of her first period is displayed in the supposed autobiographical recollections of Mr. Such when he is 'looking back' to 'the time when the fitful gleams of a spring day used to show me my own shadow as that of a small boy on a small pony, riding by the side of a larger cob-mounted shadow over the breezy uplands which we used to dignify with the name of hills, or along by-roads with broad grassy borders and hedgerows reckless of utility, on our way to outlying hamlets, whose groups of inhabitants were as distinct to my imagination as if they had belonged to different regions of the globe.'

The passages descriptive of earlier England in the same section are in her very best style,