world, that justified Lockhart and Moore in making a long story of the
lives of Scott and Byron. Even here, among men of letters, who were also
men of action and of great sociability, are not all biographies too
long? Let any sensible reader turn to the shelf where his Lives repose;
we shall be surprised if he does not find that nearly every one of them,
taking the present century alone, and including such splendid and
attractive subjects as Goethe, Hume, Romilly, Mackintosh, Horner,
Chalmers, Arnold, Southey, Cowper, would not have been all the better
for judicious curtailment. Lockhart, who wrote the longest, wrote also
the shortest, the 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