than many great men's power of conceiving the case of an opponent, and something approaching to Shakespeare's power of imagining the scenery of minds quite opposite in type to her own. There was nothing swift, lively, shallow, or flippant about her; and yet she could draw swift, lively, shallow, and flippant people with admirable skill and vivacity, as, for example, Mrs. Poyser, Mrs. Cadwallader, and many more. Her own nature was evidently sedate and rather slow-moving, with a touch of Miltonic stateliness in it, and a love of elaboration at times even injurious to her genius. Yet no characters she ever drew were more powerfully drawn than those at the very opposite pole to her own--for example, Hetty's childish, empty self-indulgence, Tito's smooth and gliding voluptuousness voluptuousness passing into treachery, Rosamond's tender susceptibility and heartless vanity. She herself was painstaking, even be yond the point up to which genius is truly defined as the power of taking pains. She often took too much pains. Her greatest stories lose in force by their too wide reflectiveness, and especially by an engrafted mood of artificial reflectiveness not suitable to her genius. She grew up under Thackeray's spell, and it is clear that Thackeray's satirical vein had too much influence over her from first to last, but especially in some of those earlier tales into which she threw a greater power of passion than any which she had to spare for the two great efforts of the last ten years. Adam Rede," which might otherwise be the greatest of all English novelsmany, no doubt, really think it so is gravely injured by those heavy satirical asides to the reader, in which you recognize the influence exerted over her mind by the genius of Thackeray-asides, however, which are by no means in keeping with the large, placid, and careful drawing of her own magnificent, and on the whole tranquil, rural cartoons. The present writer, at least, never takes up these earlier stories, "Silas Marner" excepted, without a certain sense of ir ritation at the discrepancy between the strong, rich, and free drawing of the life they contain, and the somewhat falsetto tone of many of the light reflections interspersed. George Eliot had

no command of Thackeray's literary stiletto, and her substitute for it is unwieldy. Even in the wieldy. Even in the "Scenes from Clerical Life" this jars upon us. For example, this sentence in "Janet's Repentance": "When a man is happy enough to win the affections of a sweet girl, who can soothe his cares with crochet, and respond to all his most cherished ideas with braided urn-rugs and chair-covers in German wool, he has at least a guarantee of domestic comfort, whatever trials may await him out of doors," does not please an ear accustomed to the happy bitterness of Thackeray's caustic irony. It is heavy, not to say elephantine; and this heavy raillery rather increased upon George Eliot in "Adam Bede" and the "Mill on the Floss." One is annoyed to have so great a painter of the largest human life turning aside to warn us that "when Tityrus and Melibous happen to be on the same farm, they are not sentimentally polite to each other;" or that a High- Church curate, considered abstractedly, "is nothing more than a sleek, bimanous animal, in a white neckcloth, with views more or less Anglican, and furtively addicted to the Aute." These sarcasms are not good in themselves, and still less are they good in their connection, where they spoil a most catholic-minded and marvellous picture. George Eliot's literary judg ment was not equal to her reason and her imagination, and she took a great deal too much pains with the discursive parts of her books.

Imaginatively, we hardly recognize any defect in this great painter, except that there is too little movement in her stories; they wholly want dash, and sometimes want even a steady current. No novelist, however, in the whole series of English novelists, has combined so much power of painting external life on a broad canvas with so wonderful an insight into the life of the soul. Her English butchers, farriers, auctioneers, and parish clerks, are at least as vigorously drawn as Sir Walter Scott's bailies, peasants, serving-men, and beggars; while her pictures of the inward conflicts, whether of strong or of feeble natures, are far more powerful than any which Sir Walter Scott ever attempted. Such a contrast as that between Hetty

and Dinah, such a picture as that of Mr. Casaubon's mental and moral limitation and confusion, such a study as that of Gwendolen's moral suffering under the torture administered by Grandcourt, was as much beyond the sphere of Sir Walter Scott, as his historical pictures of Louis XI., Mary Stuart, Balfour of Burley, Claverhouse, or James I. are beyond the sphere of George Eliot. On the only occasion on which George Eliot attempted anything of the nature of historical portraiture, in "Romola," the purely imaginative part of the story is far more powerful than the historical. The ideas of the time when the revival of learning took place had quite possessed themselves of George Eliot's mind, and had stirred. her into a wonderful imaginative effort. But her conceptions of the purely imagined figures-of Bardo, of Baldassarre, and of Tito-are far greater than her study of Savonarola. The genius for historical portraiture, for gathering up into a single focus the hints of chroniclers and historians, is something distinct from that of mere creation, and demands apparently a subtler mixture of interpreting with creating power, than most great creators possess. Even Sir Walter Scott failed with Napoleon, where he had not free movement enough, and the wealth of historical material shackled and overpowered the life of his imagination. It would not be true to say that George Eliot failed in like fashion with Savonarola. No doubt her

It

picture of the great Italian reformer is fine, and up to a certain point effective. But in looking back on the story, Savonarola fades away from the scene. is Bardo, the old enthusiast for the Greek learning, or the fitfully vindictive gleam of Baldassarre's ebbing intellect as flashes of his old power return to him, or the supple Greek's crafty ambition, which stands out in one's memory, while the devout and passionate Dominican is all but forgotten.

No one can deny that the moral tone of George Eliot's books-" Felix Holt" being, perhaps, a doubtful exception-is of the noblest and purest kind, nor that the tone of feeling which prevails in them goes far in advance even of their direct moral teaching. We should say, for instance, that in regard to marriage,

the spirit of George Eliot's books conveys an almost sacramental conception of its binding sacredness, though, unfortunately, of course, her career did much to weaken the authority of the teaching implied in her books. But the total effect of her books is altogether ennobling, though the profoundly sceptical reflections with which they are penetrated may counteract, to some extent, the tonic effect of the high moral feeling with which they are colored. Before or after most of the noblest scenes, we come to thoughts in which it is almost as impossible for the feelings delineated to live any intense or hopeful life, as it is for human lungs to breathe in the vacuum of an air-pump. After she has breathed a noble spirit into a great scene, she too often proceeds to exhaust the air which is the very lifebreath of great actions, so that the reflective element in her books undermines the ground beneath the feet of her noblest characters. In "Adam Bede," she eventually justifies her hero's secularistic coldness of nature, and makes you feel that Dinah was an enthusiast, who could not justify what she taught. In "Janet's Repentance, again, she expresses in a few sentences the relief with which the mind turns away from the search for convictions calculated to urge the mind to a life of beneficent self-sacrifice, to those acts of self-sacrifice themselves :

"No wonder the sick-room and the lazaretto have so often been a refuge from the

tossings of intellectual doubt-a place of repose

for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about which all creeds and all philosophies are at one here, at least, the conscience will not be dogged by doubt, the benign impulse

will not be checked by adverse theory; here

you may begin to act, without settling one preliminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the long night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand, or beseeching glance of the eye-these are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls where the stir and glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is subdued, where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow, the moral relation of man to man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity; bigotry cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it.

As we bend over the sick-bed, all the forces of our nature rush toward the channels of pity, of patience, and of love, and sweep down the miserable, choking drift of our quarrels, our debates, our would-be wisdom, and our clamorous, selfish desires. This blessing of serene freedom from the importunities of opinion lies in all simple direct acts of mercy, and is one source of that sweet calm which is often felt by the watcher in the sick-room, even when the duties there are of a hard and terrible kind."

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There speaks the true George Eliot, and we may clearly say of her that in fiction it is her great aim, while illustrating what she believes to be the true facts and laws of human life, to find a fit stage for ideal feelings nobler than any which seem to her to be legitimately bred by those facts and laws. But she too often finds herself compelled to injure her own finest moral effects by the sceptical atmosphere with which she permeates them. She makes the highhearted heroine of her Mill on the Floss" all but yield to the physiological attraction of a poor sort of man of science. She makes the enthusiastic Dorothea, in Middlemarch," decline upon a poor creature like Ladishaw, who has earned her regard chiefly by being the object of Mr. Casaubon's jealousy. She takes religiou patriotism for the subject of her last great novel, but is at some pains to show that her hero may be religious without any belief in God, and patriotic without any but an ideal country. This reflective vacuum which she pumps out behind all noble action, gives to the workings of her great imagination a general effect of supreme melancholy.

We should rank George Eliot second only in her own proper field-which is not the field of satire, Thackeray's field-to Sir Walter Scott, and second to him only because her imagination, though it penetrates far deeper, had neither the same splendid vigor of movement, nor the same bright serenity of tone. Her stories are, on the whole, richer than Fielding's, as well as far nobler, and vastly less artificial than Richardson's. They cover so much larger a breadth and deeper a depth of life than Miss Austen's, that though they are not perhaps so exquisitely finished, they belong to an al

together higher kind of world. They are stronger, freer, and less Rembrandt-like than Miss Brontë's; and are not mere photographs of social man, like Trollope's. They are patient and powerful studies of individual human beings, in an appropriate setting of social manners, from that of the dumbest provincial life to that of life of the highest self-knowledge. And yet the reflections by which they are pervaded, subtle and often wise as they are, to some extent injure the art of the pictures by their satiric tone, or if they do not do that, take superfluous pains to warn you how very doubtful and insecure is the spiritual footing on which the highest excellence plants its tread.

And this, too, is still more the fault of her poems, which, in spite of an almost Miltonic stateliness, reflect too much the monotonous cadences of her own musical but over-regulated voice. The poems want inspiration. And the speculative melancholy, which only slightly injured her prose, predominates fatally in her verse. Throughout her poems she is always plumbing the deep waters for an anchorage, and reporting "no soundings." The finest of her poems, "The Legend of Jubal," tries to affirm, indeed, that death, the loss of all conscious existence, is a sort of moral gain, as though the loss of self were the loss of selfishness, which it not only is not-but never could be, since selfishness can only be morally extinguished in a living self-but the lesson is so obviously a moral gloss put on the face of a bad business, that there, at least, no anchorage is found. And in "The Spanish Gypsy" the speculative despair is even worse, while the failure of the imaginative portraiture is more conspicuous, because the portraiture itself is more ambitious. It will be by her seven or eight great fictions that George Eliot will live, not by her poems, and still less by her essays. But all these, one perhaps excepted, will long continue to be counted the greatest achievements of an Englishwoman's, and perhaps even of any woman's brain.-From the Spec

tator.

Our party have clearly-defined principles, which they know. They don't want them expounding over and over again, like yours. I hope you may get at something this afternoon-something definite, I mean. At any rate, you will have a good chance of hearing. You see, we had ninety thousand of an audience. To-day, there will be you, the speakers, and the reporters."'

"Thanks for that sparkling gem of banter. 'Won't you join the dance?' Will you really not come and save the meeting from irretrievable disgrace? If we could proudly embellish our report in Monday's paper with the distinguished name of Percy Golding, Esq., we should feel that our exertions had not been made in vain.'

"I can tell you, you won't get the chance of doing any such thing," said Mr. Golding in a huff. Then, rapidly changing the subject, he added in milder tones,

"Where's Miss Vane? Isn't she going with you?"

"Miss Vane is at home. She cares nothing about such things, I'm happy to say. Women have no business at political meetings especially young women."

"Lots of ladies are going. Half the reserved seats are taken up with them,' said Percy; but his expression showed that he was at one with his friend on the last point, if not as to political principles in general.

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Happy man! Mine are only in the process of development. Once more, farewell!"

Percy Golding returned his nod, and the two young men separated. Bernard Aglionby, warehouseman in an Irkford firm, Radical, and freethinker, took his way toward the city; Percy Golding, his friend, banker's clerk, Conservative and Churchman, took his way out of it, humming a tune the while, and hastening his steps more than he had done when he had met Aglionby. They were fast friends, and had been so for many years. They squabbled incessantly, but quarrelled never.

As Aglionby's long legs carried him. quickly down the broad and busy thoroughfare, which gradually, as the town grew thicker, became less broad and more busy, there was at first a strongly-perceptible smile visible upon his dark, keen face-and that smile a sarcastic one. He had a remarkable face, with sharp, handsome, clear-cut features, a firm mouth, a fine brow, and dark eyes, which were often seen brilliant, but rarely soft, and which were illumined oftener than not with a glowing spark of malice and mockery. They darted from one object to another with a keenness and quickness which were remarkable. Nothing seemed to escape their scrutiny; yet there was rarely any pensiveness to be seen in their expression. Eyes and mouth, too, were given to smiling frequently, and a hearty laugh was by no means a rare event in this young man's life. Yet his laugh was not contagious, and was oftenest heard when others were perfectly grave, giving his company an uncomfortable sensation that he laughed at rather than with them.

"I wonder if we shall muster a hundred and fifty thousand this afternoon?" he speculated within himself, as he strode onward, and kept passing pieces of boarding covered with monstrous broadsheets, conspicuous among which was a huge poster in red letters on a white ground-" Palace of Ceres, Knottley, near Irkford. This day. Grand Lib