But the reason of this adequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph.

Not being a poet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poetic phrase: though she sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prose variety.

But in the other great province of character, though hers is but a Rutland to his Yorkshire--or rather to his England or his world--she is almost equally supreme.

And by her manipulation of it she showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, and even the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made to supply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitable extent.

Her philosopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) does not lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is exhausted--if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House of Humanity were exhaustible.