CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Quarterly Review. No. 268. (Murray.)—This is a very interesting number of the Quarterly. It has a clear, able, and excellent article on Central Asia ; a very thoughtful and, on the whole, just criticism of George Eliot, especially her last work, "Middlemarch," though some of the minor criticisms do not seem to us sound (by the way, has the critic studied his 3Iiddlemarch " as carefully as he ought to have done ? he is dissatisfied with what we should call the inexhaustible riches of Mr. Brooke, and he talks of Lydgate's sons, whereas he had only daughters, and of Dorothea's daughters, whereas history only avers that she had several children, among whom was one son, Mr. Brooke's heir); an inter- esting paper on Moutalembert ; and a panegyric, rather than a criticism, on Lord Lytton, which declares him to have been in the last years of his life, not only the foremost novelist, but the most eminent living writer in English literature,"—we suppose the writer means after the death of Thackeray and Dickens; but even then he stood to George Eliot in about tho same relation, as regards power, as Miss Burney stood to Fielding ; and was far and away the inferior of Trollope ; indeed, we should put the "Chronicles of Carlingford " considerably above any- thing of Lord Lytton's. On the article concerning "Greek at the Univer- sities" we have spoken elsewhere. The attack on the Irish University Bill is for the Quarterly, perhaps moderate.
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