Wayne Booth's clarifying the role of commentary in Victorian and early fiction demonstrates that John Holloway was on firm ground when he claimed in The Victorian Sage that authors of fiction and nonfiction shared rhetorical techniques, for, like the sages, the narrators of many Victorian novels strive to create this effect of credibility. In fact, certain works of Victorian fiction -- George Eliot's Felix Holt comes to mind -- succeed to the extent that they do largely because of an interesting, trustworthy narrator and not because they have particularly effective characterization or plot. Holt stands out as a particularly ineffective and ineffectual protagonist, and yet Eliot's novel engages the reader, for like the writings of Carlyle and Arnold, its discursive sections successfully produce ethos. Nonetheless, I must emphasize once again that despite such important similarities between ethos in fiction and nonfiction, the appeals to credibility made by the narrator of Felix Holt differ in two ways from those in Chartism, Unto This Last, or Culture and Anarchy. First, although both literary forms create personae that represent idealized versions of the author, that in the writings of the sage remains much closer to the author himself and is clearly meant to be understood as being the author. Second, the kind of ethos sought by the major Victorian novelists is that of the traditional wisdom speaker whereas that sought by the sages is that of a contentious, alienated prophet. Eliot's narrator in Felix Holt, in other words, has far more in common with Emerson than with Carlyle and Thoreau.