This was the collection, in enormous scrapbooks, of newspaper cuttings on a vast variety of subjects, to be worked up into fiction when the opportunity served.

Reade had so much genius--he had perhaps the most, in a curious rather incalculable fashion, of the whole group--that he very nearly succeeded in digesting these "marine stores" of detail and document into real books.

But he did not always, and could not always, quite do it: and he remains, with Zola, the chief example of the danger of working at your subject too much as if you were getting up a brief, or preparing an article for an encyclopedia.

Still, his greatest books, which are probably _It is Never too Late to Mend_ (1856) and _The Cloister and the Hearth_ (1861), have immense vigour and, in the second case, an almost poetic attraction which Dickens never reaches, while over all sparks and veins of genius are scattered.
Moreover, he is interesting because, until his own time, he would have been quite impossible; and, even at that time, without the general movement which we are describing, very unlikely.
There is not so much object here in discussing the much discussed question of the merits and defects of "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans or Mrs.Cross) as a novelist, as there is in pointing out her relations to this general movement.

She began late, and almost accidentally; and there is less unity in her general work than in some others here mentioned.