Embarrassed to say that before this poem I hadn't read anything by George Eliot ^^" (It was two years of Jane Austen's 'Northanger Abbey' for me ^___^ And I was a teenager who loved reading but didn't completely understand subtext: 'They're saying one thing and meaning another? What?' ^__^ I dipped into Northanger Abbey again a while ago and was surprised by how funny it was.)

It is a wonderful poem - and could have been written for Holmes.