90 EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 



little later still hers was the only presence he recognised. 

 The patient, quiet Mrs. Moss's emotional nature was 

 wholly expended in her domestic affection. The heroine, 

 Af aggie herself, was no fine lady, but she was surely one 

 of nature's gentlewomen. By unusual capability and by 

 opportune circumstance, she rose high above the 

 little world in which she lived. Two verdicts will always 

 be passed on her. No impassioned nature will think 

 of her without tears or profoundest pity; the con- 

 ventional would not call upon her if she chanced to be 

 a neighbour. Powerful though reticent impulse led 

 her to the gipsy's tent; powerful impulse led her to 

 kiss Philip Wakem. An impulse foreign to the (un- 

 reticent) Dodson blood drove her to step into the boat 

 with Stephen Guest. She yearned for her brother's 

 love " as sun-scorched summer earth yearns for rain," 

 She did not know that his bones could not support and 

 his skin could not cover the measure of love she 

 thirsted for. To a Robert Burns she would have been 

 something akin to Paradise, but to a John Bunyan, or 

 John Wesley, or John Ruskin, something more akin to 

 Hades. Had Burns, or Byron, or Shakspere, or Goethe 

 begun life mated to a woman of her overwhelming 

 affection, especially if linked with her endowments, 

 the world might have gained something in saintliness, 

 and probably lost something of tragic incident, some- 

 thing of poetry. 



No possible training, I venture to suggest, could have 

 developed a tornado of passion in Mrs. Glegg's anatomy, 

 nor the shadow of shrewishness in Maggie Tulliver's. 



In the " Autobiography of Mark Rutherford " we get 

 a significant glimpse of character in both its bodily and 

 intellectual features. A woman of clearly impassioned 

 temperament is telling, under the pressure of deep 



