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Brown, John Crombie, -1879?

"The Ethics of George Eliot's Works"

"
And in her final selection of Mr Farebrother, she is guided not alone by
her sense of his general and essential fitness for the work assigned to
him, but also in some degree by her desire to make whist-playing for
money, and the comparatively inferior society into which it necessarily
draws him, no longer a need of his outer life.
Of all the less prominent relations into which Dorothea Brooke is
brought, there is not one more touchingly tender, or in which her whole
nature is drawn more beautifully out, than that to Rose Vincy. Between
these two, at least on the side of the hard unpenetrable incarnation of
self-inclusion and self-pleasing, any approach to harmony or sympathy is
impossible. There is not even any true ground of womanhood on which
Rosamond can meet Dorothea; for she is nearly as far removed from
womanhood as Tito Melema is from manliness or manhood. Yet even here the
tender pitifulness of Dorothea overpasses a barrier that to any other
would be impassable. In her sweet, instinctive, universal sympathy for
human sorrow and pain, she finds a common ground of union; and in no
fancied sense of superiority--solely from the sense of common human
need--she strives to console, to elevate, to lead back to hope and trust,
with a gentle yet steadfast simplicity all her own.


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