custom and depicting a code of manners woven of the latest fashion. Surpassing the truth and beauty of both, she deals with the permanent heart of humanity, and represents, beyond all others, the moral type of to-day, which brings into prominence character, as active and passive, struggling with temptation, and perfecting itself through trivial cares and besetting trials.

She has not the vigorous movement, the serene tone, of Scott; she may not have the exquisite finish of Miss Austen, nor the concentrative intensity of Miss Bronté; she cannot sketch with the rapidity of Fielding: but none of them combines in equal splendor the power of painting the external, and the insight into the life of the soul. Above them all is she distinguished by the constant reference of things to facts and laws which are universal -always the condition of highest literature. She stands at the confluence of the real and the ideal, looking from the less into the larger, with finer and stronger vision than Dickens or Thackeray. With Shakespeare, she has the gift of the dramatistnarrower than his in range, but, within its limits, equal; with him, she has the gift of analysis-less in quantity, superior in quality. Like him, she enters sympathetically into minds and opinions quite opposite to her own. How admirably can she draw a lively, a shallow, or a flippant personage,-herself grave even to melancholy; or a believing and devout Christian,—herself a naturalist, an eclectic in religion! The figures on her canvas, especially the earlier, are known as directly and intimately as any in real or fictitious history. And who has approached her in the ability to seize the essential characteristics and exhibit the real charm of that quiet English country life which is her sphere?

As with the great Elizabethan, form is subordinate to content. The motive is supreme over all. How large a space in the whole bulk of her volumes does she usurp for her own interspersed interpretation and comment! This may seem to Taine and Matthew Arnold very inartistic; but we are rather glad that, not content to be a mere anatomist or spectator, she has ventured not only to exhibit human nature in action, but to explain the motives of the action, and to speculate lovingly and vividly on human life. Possibly, in her later works she may sometimes be too discursive. Perhaps, also, her finest moral effects may there be injured by a too fatalistic conception of things, by a certain vagueness and doubt,

as of a world hopelessly and irrecoverably dark; but this is no reproach to her art, except so far as it may be partial. Mistake, frustration, doom, dimness of perception and waste of force, are indisputable phases of mortality; and judgments can differ only as to the degree in which the destiny of mankind shall be painted justly in hues of gloom.

Noteworthy as a poet, she will be remembered as a novelist. It is in the latter function that she has wrought upon the taste and conscience of her age. She will continue to be read in the former by those who desire to know the fulness of her genius.

One of the rare human souls whom we account our loftiest one who neither carries the feminine quality to its height, like Mrs. Browning; nor transcends the limitations of her sex, like Madame de Staël. Fixing our estimate of success by humor, pathos, thought, portraiture, and mastery of language,-what woman has touched so high a point in literature? Shakespeare enables us to dispense with Jonson and Beaumont, but who has rendered George Eliot superfluous?

Character. Of the calm, contemplative order; of opulent imagination, profound humor, delicate selective talent; supreme over all English novelists in rich and multifarious culture; uniting to a truthful realism a poetic idealism, and to the largeness of conception that views the simplest and homeliest object in broad relationship, a psychological insight that pursues life to its inmost solitude.

Her sympathy with human suffering and human limitation was elemental. She was fond of children, had a deep, catholic love for mankind, appreciated all varieties of character, believing that in the humblest are sublime promptings. Her nature was thoroughly feminine-sensitive, deeply and nobly affectionate. If she could expound the broad claims of universal brotherhood, and comprehend the 'high necessities of art,' she could also feel and express with simplicity the intensity of personal devotion:

'Sweet evenings come and go, love,

They came and went of yore: This evening of our life, love,

Shall go and come no more. When we have passed away, love, All things will keep their name; But yet no life on earth, love,

With ours will be the same.

The daisies will be there, love,

The stars in heaven will shine:
I shall not feel thy wish, love,
Nor thou my hand in thine.
A better time will come, love,
And better souls be born:
I would not be the best, love,
To leave thee now forlorn.'

To the highest gifts she united the noblest purposes. How grateful was she for every moulding and elevating influence! and she yearned to be helpful! Her glowing prayer was to

'Be to other souls

The cup of strength in some great agony;
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love;
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty;

Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense.'

Profoundly devout, she was unable to accept much of what is usually held as religious belief. Her works, eminently among those of the day, embody the central ethics of Christ, yet without any intellectual acceptance of Christianity as a dogmatic scheme. Her religion appears to have been in general harmony with that of Auguste Comte,-the religion of Humanity. Her creed is, 'Religion is kindness.' 'The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.' The soul ascends to a divine life by self-surrender to its own highest intimations. Man lives in man so much, at least, is certain. An assured blessing of Death, if not the final one, is, that it destroys the selfish egotisms of the flesh, and leaves us an impersonal immortality in human gladness. for gifts bestowed. With sad incompleteness she says:

'The only better is a Past that lives

On through an added Present, stretching still
In hope unchecked by shaming memories
To life's last memories.'

If not an optimist, neither is she a pessimist. If she neither affirms nor denies, she hopes. Of the sweet Methodist in Adam Bede: 'When she came to the question, Will God take care of us when we die? she uttered it in such a tone of plaintive appeal that the tears came into some eyes.' The idea of Destiny, which environs us like a drop of dew in the heart of a rock, seems in her latter years almost to master her, yet does she continue a writer of generous aims, who would carve out larger space for every soul imprisoned in pettiness, doubt, or convention:

'Nay, never falter; no great deed is done
By falterers who ask for certainty.

No good is certain; but the steadfast mind,
The undivided will to seek the good,-
'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings
A human music from the indifferent air.
The greatest gift the hero leaves his race

Is to have been a hero. Say we fail ?—

We feed the high tradition of the world,
And leave our spirits in Zincalo breasts.'

Influence.-A moral teacher of the purest and noblest tone, not incidentally or artistically, but purposely and distinctly. She has afforded the deepest speculation to the few, while she has impressed upon the many the excellence of patient work, the beauty of self-sacrifice, the sovereignty of duty; and to all she has brought exalting inspiration.

While we do not doubt that the total effect is beneficent, we must believe that the nobleness she inculcates is hindered by her agnosticism. The utmost manhood and womanhood can never be developed without the clear appeal to eternity. The strongest will feel at last the oppression of that mournful philosophy whose lights of gayety seem but foil to the overhanging gloom; whose sweetest, grandest creatures ill-matched with the environment of their life-struggle so often to a pitiable or sorrowful end; and which, in abortive answer to human entreaty, peeps over the edges of our planet, to discover for the Gethsemane of life only an illimitable void.

Besides the choral strain of moral piety, consider the wealth of wit and wisdom which the mind and heart of the race inherit forever. Where can be found in works of the same kind so rare a mine of thought for the worshipper to take to his bosom, for the writer to enrich his discourse, for the thinker to ponder, for the divine to quote,— for all to assimilate and to use? Here are some examples:

'It is hard to be wise on an empty stomach.'

'It is never too late to be what you might have been.'

'Speech is but broken light upon the depths of the unspoken.'

'It's easy finding reasons why other people should be patient.'

'Genius, at first, is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.' 'When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush.' 'I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.'

'The tale of the Divine pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity.'

'When Death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.'

'Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so bridges over the loveless chasms of his life.'

'There is no sorrow I have thought more about than to love what is great, and try to reach it and yet to fail.'

Th' young men nooadeys, th're poor squashy things,-the' looke weel enoof, but the' woon't wear, the' woon't wear.'

'So our lives glide on: the river ends, we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.'

"There's no pleasure in living if you're to be corked up forever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.'

'Our deeds are like children born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Children may be strangled, but deeds never.'

'We look at the one little woman's face we love as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.'

Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless; as if those were not often the best teachers, who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes.'

'Things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.'

'It's poor work, allus settin' the dead above the livin'. It 'ud be better if folks 'ud make much on us beforehand instid o' beginnin' when we're gone.'

'By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is, and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil.'

Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character.'

Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms-taking their vague, uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.'

'A child, more than all other gifts

That earth can offer to declining man,

Brings hope with it and forward-looking thought.'

Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn 'sunsets or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty. Our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.'

The temptation to quote further must be resisted. The prayer of this good and gifted woman is answered. Her place is secure among those

Immortal dead who still live on

In minds made better by their presence; live

In pulses stirred to generosity;

In deeds of daring rectitude; in scorn

For miserable aims that end with self;

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To vaster issues.'