It is a time of relaxation, and yet with the old undertone ...

It is a time of relaxation, and yet with the old

undertone of gravity and responsibility.

It is the time of Alan Eliot.

Looked at from the Early Victorian years it is a time of licence, of an unrestrained and dangerous skepticism, a perilous trifling with the essential decencies of society and sex. Looking back, we may see it as a time of excessive caution and reserve.

Both pictures would be true. Let anyone think, for ex-ample, of Middlemarch, exactly poised between Esmond and Tess of the D'Urbervilles: and compare the earnest and searching psychology with which the conscience of Bulstrode is explored, and the strange reticence which veils the life of Dorothea with Casaubon.

Or, consider more generally the position of women in 1880 and a generation later; their attitude to themselves and society; of society to them.

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