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be interesting apart from them. The infanticide in 'Adam Bede,' the finding of Godfrey Cass's bones in 'Silas Marner,' the hesitation of Bulstrode over the adminstration of alcohol to the dying scoundrel by whom he watched in 'Middlemarch,' are all vulgar, police-court incidents in themselves, apart from the special characters concerned in them; they are not at all like incidents which thrill us if separated from the special actors, and their mental and moral qualities. But her persons live, and are profoundly interesting, whether seeming to mould or to be moulded by their surroundings. They pass into our lives, and become a part of them, are quite as real to us as the creatures of flesh and blood whom we have known and see no longer, are more real than historical characters who have actually lived, but whom we have never seen. Yet here we must introduce a limitation. Her imagination was great, and it created non-existent scenes, which yet become vividly real, when she knew the kind of persons who moved among them. She was intimately acquainted with peasant and artizan and farmhouse life, with the professional people in country towns; she failed conspicuously when she drew what might be called the upper classes as such: her ladies are always a little stiff, her gentlemen not only stiff but somewhat underbred. This is only to say that she had not the allembracing, all-creative genius of Shakspere; but she failed when she did so in good company. Her limitations were of the same kind and in the same field as those of Dickens, and of the only writer now worthy to be named as a really great dramatic novelist since George Eliot died, Thomas Hardy. On her own ground her characters are all that could be wished; they are human and vivid; it requires an effort of memory to recall that we know them only in a book, and that we have not actually walked and talked with them in familiar intercourse.

We are sure that George Eliot would herself have regarded any attempt to mark her place in literature as wholly inadequate which took no account of her poems, and we are free to confess that we admire these more than seems the fashion, in an age that is perhaps over-pedantic about absolute finish of form, to the disregard of the matter of poetry. Yet a few lyrics, such as Ladislaw's song in 'Middlemarch,' a few sustained pieces of blank verse, as 'Oh might I join the choir invisible!' are as admirable in form as in poetic feeling. the longer poems, George Eliot's predominant message is perhaps brought out more gravely and concisely than in her novels; though it was present in all she wrote. Her message

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to humanity was the assertion of absolute inexorableness of law, that in spite of repentance and agony, consequences must follow from their causes, that every human life is so intertwined with the great whole that no act of men is unfelt by man. Stern and solemn, yet wise and wholesome teacher, she was but handing on to others what she was learning, that in which she was acquiescing with a solemn and wise trustfulness during every year of her existence.

The birth of her higher intellectual life had taken place through many throes, but she never would have wished the birth and all that led to it not to have been. It may be well also to understand G. H. Lewes's mental attitude in regard to it. He wrote in his journal

Jan. 28, 1859. Walked along the Thames towards Kew to meet Herbert Spencer, who was to spend the day with us, and we chatted with him on matters personal and philosophical. I owe him a debt of gratitude. My acquaintance with him was the brightest ray in a dreary wasted period of my life. I had given up all ambition whatever, lived from hand to mouth, and thought the evil of each day sufficient. The stimulus of his intellect, especially during our long walks, roused my energy once more and revived my dormant love of science. His intense theorising tendency was contagious, and it was only the stimulus of a theory which could then have induced me to work. I owe Spencer another and a deeper debt. It was through him that I learned to know Marian-to know her was to love her and since then my life has been a new birth. To her I owe all my prosperity and all my happiness. God bless her!

Yet both recognized that there was amari aliquid; they were too transparently truthful, too honest, not to admit that they were paying the uttermost farthing for social rules defied. This was shown in the touching and beautiful clinging to each other; the sort of bondage worn willingly, yet which in husband and wife who felt no doubt of their position would have become irksome, that one never stirred without the other for fear of misconceptions; it was shown in the sensitive shrinking from all who did not seek their society; it was shown in sentences in letters like the following, which has in it a most pathetic sound of wailing. The highest calling and election is to do without opium, and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance."

It is impossible to leave this difficult subject, once for all, without a word about George Eliot's attitude to Mr. Lewes's three sons who came under her care. To them she acted as a tender mother, and among the most graceful and affectionate letters in the volume are those to the eldest son, who alone of the sons is now living, and who was her heir. They repaid A Student of the Bible.

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this love with affection and respect, nor did her marriage with Mr. Cross in any degree break the affectionate relations between the survivor of them and her whom he had so long called mother.

Those who have studied the workings of the religious spirit are well aware that when once it has taken hold of the heart of man it is rarely extinguished, even if it be manifested in very different ways, and sometimes even in regard to different objects. The flame once kindled revives when it seems to die down. For some considerable time after George Eliot broke with her old faith there is no direct mention of religious matters in her letters or diary. There would appear to have been a time of great spiritual desolation, resulting from that antagonism to faith which she had so strongly exemplified in her translations from Strauss and Feuerbach, during a time in which she might fairly have been described as a freethinker. But by 1862 that phase had wholly passed away. Then she wrote to Madame Bodichon

I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no-faith to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact I have very little sympathy with freethinkers as a class, and have lost all interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only to know if possible the lasting meaning which lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now.

In the same year she was reading Mrs. Browning's 'Casa Guidi Windows,' which seemed to her to contain ' a very noble expression of what I believe to be the true relation of the religious mind to the past.' She became again, indeed perhaps had never ceased to be, a diligent student of the Bible, and writes to a friend who had given her a marker of Coventry ribbon, 'If my book-marker were just a little longer I should keep it in my beautiful Bible in large print, which Mr. Lewes bought for me in prevision for my old age.' And there is a sentence in a letter which brings out the recurrent affection for, as distinguished from adhesion to, her old faith, when saying how much in all matters she is out of rapport with the public taste she mentions Renan's 'Vie de Jésus.' 'I have read Renan's book, which has proved to be eminently in the public taste; and after saying she dislikes it come these curious words: 'His Life of Jesus has so much artistic merit that it will do a great deal towards the culture of ordinary minds by giving them a sense of unity between that far-off past and our present.' She disliked the destructive and clung to the constructive side of that remarkable book.

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And, strange as it seems, others who have been brought up in the school of Strauss have felt the same in regard to Renan's work. Strauss and several other of the older unbelievers, whether or not they took his line precisely, endeavoured to resolve the historic Christ into a myth, beneath which was an almost impalpable substratum of fact. But Renan brings before us a man living and vigorous, and it is not wonderful that some, finding this reality in the place of the unsubstantial myth, have gone back further on the lines of faith, and found not only the Jesus of Galilee, but the Divine Man of the Gospels.

The faith to which George Eliot herself more and more tended was Positivism, not uninfluenced therein, as it would seem, by her close intimacy with Dr. and Mrs. Congreve. One of the characteristics of Comte's system is the manner in which, denying nothing of the past, he simply drops what does not suit him, and appropriates, so to speak, what he can of other creeds. But of Comte she herself said more than once to friends in the later years of her life, 'I will not submit to him my heart or my intellect.' There are however, indications in the book that she subscribed to the Subside, or yearly fund for the maintenance of the Positivist organization, and so far she was a member of that religious body. But in reality, as Positivism has been defined with some smartness, though with less truth, as 'Catholicism without God,' George Eliot's own position might be said in the same half-truthful and incomplete way to be the usual religious emotion directed to mantinstead of God, and without the hope of a personal future. But since neither her attitude nor Comte's was one of denial, she never formulated this negation of hope, but strove after her light to do her duty in what is next best to hope, acquiescence. She took what life had to give her of enjcyment; it was not much, because of constant ill-health; she tried to make it less bitter for others in the whole spirit of her great Positivist poems, and she placed her immortality in the after strength she might give to others. That is not the attitude of most of those who will read this review. We have endeavoured to explain, not to justify nor to condemn. In such a case each must judge for himself what to say about so complex a problem, even more complex than the moral one. We do not sit in the chair of St. Peter to decide on orthodoxy or heterodoxy. It is well for us if we walk as best we can by such light as we ourselves have.

As the years went on more people gathered round the

Leweses at their final London home, the Priory in St. John's Wood. As of old, they themselves sought no one, but the circle grew through the introductions of friends, and the afternoons there were always pleasant and interesting, if sometimes overcrowded and now and then a trifle stiff. Some one or other invented a legend that though the relation between these distinguished persons had not originally been that of matrimony, the first Mrs. Lewes had died, and a marriage had been solemnized on the Continent. And some persons on that account visited George Eliot who would not have done so before, as if after all those years the situation would really have been unchanged. Those most concerned were probably unconscious of the rumour, which had no foundation; and certainly they had no part in it. We need say little about these gatherings at the Priory. No words could give to any who did not know them any notion of George Eliot's grave dignity and the consummate skill with which she led the conversation to lofty and interesting themes. The only subject never discussed was her own writings. Her voice, low, but extremely distinct, and with tones like some rich musical instrument, her words slow and chosen, giving the effect of each sentence having been clearly arranged in her mind before utterance, were in strong contrast to Mr. Lewes's rapid and dramatic conversation, accurate also, though so vivacious and sparkling. Those days were best to the intimate visitors at which by some accident few came, and the talk led by these two was general.

In the end of November, 1878, Mr. Lewes died, after a short and sharp illness, and she who had leaned so much on him could only record in her journal on January 1st of the next year, 'Here I and sorrow sit.' To carry out Mr. Lewes's work in the way he would most-have wished became her one desire, and she devoted a considerable sum of money to the foundation of a scholarhip to bear his name, which should 'supply an income to a young man who is qualified and eager to carry on physiological research, and would not otherwise have the means of doing so.'

In May, 1880, George Eliot married Mr. John Walter Cross. Mr. Cross's own account of the matter is in the fewest words and in the best possible taste. He was many years younger than herself, and had long been a trusted friend of herself and of Mr. Lewes. He, now that she was alone, saw, in his wife's words, 'his happiness in the dedication of his life' to her. Neither felt that any wrong was done to the memory of Mr.