pursuits, and might scatter it abroad in triviality-people who seemed to lie outside the path of remarkable providences?"

Bulstrode felt at times that his action was unrighteous, but how could he go back? He had mental exercises calling himself naught, laid hold on redemption and went on in his course of instrumentality. He was "carrying on two distinct lives" -a religious one and a wicked one. "His religious activity could not be incompatible with his wicked business as soon as he had argued himself into not feeling it incompatible."

"The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine nced with him. There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs."

And now Providence seemed to be taking sides against him. "A threatening Providence-in other words, a public exposure -urged him to a kind of propitiation which was not a doctrinal transaction. The divine tribunal had changed its aspect to him. Self-prostration was no longer enough. He must bring restitution in his hand. By what sacrifice could he stay the rod He believed that if he did something right God would stay the rod, and save him from the consequences of his wrong-doing." His religion was "the religion of personal fear," which "remains nearly at the level of the savage. The exposure comes, and the explosion. Society shudders with hypocritical horror, especially in the presence of poor Mrs. Bulstrode, who "should have some hint given her, that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet." Society when it is very candid, and very conscientious, and very scrupulous, cannot "allow a wife to remain ignorant long that the town holds a bad opinion of her husband." The photograph of the Middlemarch gossips sitting upon the case of Mrs. Bulstrode is taken accurately. Equally accurate, and far more impressive, is the narrative of circumstantial evidence

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gathering against the innocent Lydgate and the guilty Bulstrode-circumstances that will sometimes weave into one tableau of public odium the purest and the blackest characters. From this tableau you may turn to that one in " Adam Bede," and see how circumstances are made to crush the weak woman and clear the wicked man. And then you can go to Romola," or indeed to almost any of these novels, and see how wrong-doing may come of an indulged infirmity of purpose, that unconscious weakness and conscious wickedness may bring about the same disastrous results, and that repentance has no more effect in averting or altering the consequences in one case than the other. Tito's ruin comes of a feeble, Felix Holt's victory of an unconquerable, will. Nothing is more characteristic of George Eliot than her tracking of Tito through all the motives and counter motives from which he acted. "Because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing so much as his own safety, he came at last to commit such deeds as make a man infamous." So poor Romola tells her son, as a warning, and adds: “If you make it the rule of your life to escape from what is disagreeable, calamity may come just the same, and it would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it."

Out of this passion for the analysis of motives comes the strong character, slightly gnarled and knotted by natural circumstances, as trees that are twisted and misshapen by storms and floods or characters gnarled by some interior force working in conjunction with or in opposition to outward circumstances. She draws no monstrosities, or monsters, thus avoiding on the one side romance and on the other burlesque. She keeps to life-the life that fails from "the meanness of opportunity," or is "dispersed among hindrances," "wrestles" unavailingly "with universal pressure."

or

Why had Mr. Gilfil in those late years of his beneficent life more of the knots and ruggedness of poor human nature than there lay any clear hint of it in the open-eyed, loving" young

Maynard? Because "it is with men as with trees if you lop off their finest branches into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence, and what might have been a grand tree, expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical, misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty; and the trivial, erring life, which we visit with our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a inan whose best limb is withered. The dear old Vicar had been sketched out by nature as a noble tree. The heart of him was sound, the grain was of the finest, and in the gray-haired man, with his slipshod talk and caustic tongue, there was the main trunk of the same brave, faithful, tender nature that had poured out the finest, freshest forces of its life-current in a first and only love."

Her style is influenced by her purpose-may be said, indeed, to be created by it. The excellences and the blemishes of the diction come of the end sought to be attained by it. Its subtleties and obscurities were equally inevitable. Analytical thinking takes on an analytical phraseology. It is a striking instance of a mental habit creating a vocabulary. The method of thought produces the form of rhetoric. Some of the sentences are mental landscapes. The meaning seems to be in motion on the page. It is elusive from its very subtlety. It is more our analyst than her character of Rufus Lyon, who "would fain find language subtle enough to follow the utmost intricacies of the soul's pathways." Mrs. Transome's" lancetedged epigrams" are dull in comparison with her own. She uses them with startling success in dissecting motive and analyzing feeling. They deserve as great renown as "Nélaton's probe."

For example: "Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, especially about your own feelings

-much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.' That ought to make such a revelation of the religious diary-keeper to himself as to make him ashamed of himself. And this will fit in here: "Our consciences are not of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws-they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories ;" and this: "Every strong feeling makes to itself a conscience of its own-has its own piety."

Who can say that the joints of his armor are not open to this thrust? "The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is in the logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink." Silas Marner lost his money through his 66 sense of security," which "more frequently springs from habit than conviction." He went unrobbed for fifteen years, which supplied the only needed condition for his being robbed now. A compensation for stupidity: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity." Who does not at once recognize" that mixture of pushing forward and being pushed forward as "the brief history of most human beings?" Who has not seen advancement hindered by impetuous candor ?" or "private grudges christened by the name of public zeal?" or a church built with an exuberance of faith and a deficiency of funds?" or a man who would march determinedly along the road he thought best, but who was easily convinced which was best?" or a preacher "whose oratory was like a Belgian railway horn, which shows praiseworthy intentions inadequately fulfilled?"

There is something chemical about such an analysis as this

of Rosamond: "Every nerve and muscle was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique. She even acted her own character, and so well that she did not know it to be precisely her own!" Nor is the exactness of this any less cruel: "We may handle extreme opinions with impunity, while our furniture and our dinner-giving link us to the established order." Why not own that "the emptiness of all things is never so striking to us as when we fail in them?" Is it not better to avoid "following great reformers beyond the threshold of their own homes?" Does not " sense learn the manners of good society?"

our moral

The lancet works impartially, because the hand that holds it is the hand of a conscientious artist. She will endure the severest test you can apply to an artist in fiction. She does not betray any religious bias in her novels, which is all the more remarkable now that we find it in these essays. Nor is it at all remarkable that this bias is so very easily discovered in the novels by those who have found it in her essays! Whatever opinions she may have expressed in her critical reviews, she is not the Evangelical, or the Puritan, or the Jew, or the Methodist, or the Dissenting Minister, or the Churchman, any more than she is the Radical, the Liberal, or the Tory, who talks in the pages of her fiction.

Every side has its say, every prejudice its voice, and every prejudice and side and vagary even has the philosophical reason given for it, and the charitable explanation applied to it. She analyzes the religious motives without obtrusive criticism or acrid cynicism or nauseous cant-whether of the orthodox or heretical form.

The art of fiction has nothing more elevated, or more touching, or fairer to every variety of religious experience, than the delineation of the motives that actuated Dinah Morris the Methodist preacher, Deronda the Jew, Dorothea the Puritan, Adam and Seth Bede, and Janet Dempster.

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Who can object to this? Religious ideas have the fate of