duced the religious element into her novel because, apart from its inherent attractions for the moral earnestness that was natural to her, she felt the artist's instinct of its adaptedness to help her produce her effects. It was further clear that she had the genuine artist's conscience to be judicially fair, or else, what served as well, the genuine artist's tact to be effectively faithful in her use of her religious material. Her reproduction of the Christian religious experience, as far, at least, as respected its forms of outward expression-and farther, of course, was impossible-wanted nothing of being exquisitely true to the rarest reality. The most mysticallyminded evangelical Christian might find his finest moods of devotion reflected in the prayers and the discourses and the conversations of Dinah, the lovely Methodist woman preacher, who is the real heroine of "Adam Bede." Nothing, not divinely inspired, in history or in fiction, could well surpass the sweet, the heavenly beauty of Dinah's life. But side by side with this beautiful life, a life wholesomely and not morbidly beautiful, represented as believed by the liver of it to be a life drawn directly from a hidden spring in the heart of Christ, yet so represented in such a way that the writer is not once. committed outright as either adhering or not adhering herself to that transcendent belief-side by side with a life like this, nay, in immediate contact with it day after day, without being affected by it, a life how differentLisbeth's an utterly sordid, earth-bound, carnal life, goes on, in the undisturbedly complacent portraiture of the impartial author, who never forgets the artist in the fellow-being to betray the slightest vicarious moral concern that a human soul should thus prove unheedful, and miss to know the day of its heavenly visitation. It is not that this contrast is not true to the occurrences of actual life. It is that no yearning emotion, no Pauline

travail of spirit, is elicited from the writer in witnessing the tragedy that she creates. There is, perhaps, manifest a certain tender relenting on her part-a gentle, half-stoical despair that relieves itself with a laugh of Democritus. What lacks is the mother-anguish of that distinctively Christian sorrow which weeps because it would have saved. In short, with respect to the fortunes of the life beyond life, not Shakespeare himself could be more supremely neutral, not the Epicurean Jove more serenely indifferent, as a creator administering for the beings of his creation.

Such is the conclusion at which the thoughtful student of "Adam Bede," taking the purely critical literary point of view, might easily arrive. But before "Adam Bede" appeared, its author had furnished to the critic other means for learning her motive and method. She had published in "Blackwood's Maga zine" a series of sketches afterwards collected under the common descriptive title of "Scenes of Clerical Life." These pieces seem now, viewed in the retrospect, to bear somewhat the character of studies for her later more serious productions. With greater propriety, perhaps, they might be regarded as short essays in a kind of composition as to which it was more needful to the writer to try the taste of the public than it was to try her own powers. For the first sketch, "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton," exhibits almost as much assured and tranquil sense of mastery, on the part of the author, in mere style of composition and method of development, as is exhibited in "Middlemarch." There is even more repose of style in the earlier than in the later production. Hardly till "Middlemarch" would George Eliot have written, for example, this sentence: "Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimo

nial acquaintanceship?" ("Middlemarch," vol. i, p. 26, Harper's Ed.) A shrewd question, with pregnant implication-but not quite comfortably expressed. The ambition of high achievement seems to have been a subsequent growth with George Eliot. The trophies of George Eliot who had written, it was, perhaps, each time, that would not let George Eliot that was writing sleep. "Scenes of Clerical Life," are, in fact, so quiet in tone that their quietness comes near being a mannerism. They are intensely realistic pictures of perfectly commonplace life and character. The style of the composition is admirable. It is admirable enough to make these sketches well worth reading for the sake of the style alone. But it is so completely admirable that it scarcely of itself attracts any attention at all. It is only the writer practised enough to know, from experience of his own, how far off from the beginning of effort the end of effort is, in the attainment of such a style, that will bethink himself to notice the exquisite perfection of these pieces as mere composition.

The chief merit, however, of these pieces was not the finish of their style. They possessed the equally unique and perhaps graver merit of being a revelation to most people of the more than dramatic interest of humor and of pathos lying hidden under the common and every-day life that their neighbors are living around them. The traits of shrewd observation and of wise reflection that these "Scenes" exhibited might well, even in that early phase of the author's crescent fame, embolden one of the great British quarterlies in a review perhaps it was of "Adam Bede," to apply that almost awful epithet of supreme literary ascription, "Shakespearean." The felicity of expression, too, always corresponded. You read, and you smile, as you read, with pure pleasure of intellectual recognition,

coming again and again upon a trait of human character or conduct so exquisitely fitted with its happy phrase that it is like what you can imagine it might be if, by some magical good fortune, you had chanced upon a treasure-trove of a few original types of nature, easily perfect at once, and with no trace of any workmanship whatever upon them. How much character, for instance, is unfolded with a stroke of the pen when of a certain "thin woman with a chron c livercomplaint," at a tea-party, it is quietly said: "She has brought her knitting-no frivolous fancy knitting, but a substantial woollen stocking; the click-click of her knitting needles is the running accompaniment to all her conversation; and in her utmost enjoyment of spoiling a friend's self-satisfaction, she was never known to spoil a stocking." Again: "Mrs. Patten does not admire this excessive click-clicking activity. Quiescence in an easy-chair, under the sense of compound interest perpetually accumulating, has long seemed an ample function to her, and she does her malevolence gently." She cherishes "a quiet blood-relation's hatred for her niece, Janet Gibbs, who, she knows, expects a large legacy, and whom she is determined to disappoint. Her money shall all go in a lump to a distant relation of her husband's, and Janet shall be saved the trouble of pretending to cry, by finding that she is left with a miserable pittance." A manservant does double duty as groom and as table-waiter at the house of a certain gentleman whose sister, living with him, had inherited title without estate from a deceased Polish count, her husband, but nevertheless aspired to some style in her house-keeping: "John" is represented as "removing the tea things from the drawing-room, and brushing the crumbs from the tablecloth with an accompanying hiss, such as he was wont

* * * * *

to encourage himself with in rubbing down Mr. Bridmain's horse."

The members of a clerical party are described: "At Mr. Ely's right hand you see a very small man with a sallow and somewhat puffy face, whose hair is brushed straight up, evidently with the intention of giving him a height somewhat less disproportionate to his sense of his own importance than the measure of five feet three. accorded to him by an oversight of nature." The Rev. Amos himself was "very full of plans which were something like his moves in chess-admirably well calculated, supposing the state of the case were otherwise."

One feels, of course, how inadequate an impression of the fertile observation, the pregnant insight, with which these pages abound, any such excerpts torn from their relief in the context must necessarily make. A volume was recently published in England (it has since been re-published, with additions for "Middlemarch," in this country) entitled "Wit and Wisdom of George Eliot." It is a remarkable monument to the manifold fecundity, and to the invulnerable vitality no less, of her genius. But shreds from the woof ill represent a finished and continuous fabric of the loom. It is the exquisite fitness of the sentiment to the situation or to the character, say, rather, to the character in the situation, that gives to George Eliot's exuberant, though never too exuberant, wit and wisdom their consummate value and effect. She loves to be sententious. fonder of reflection than she is of narration. Her plot is for the sake of her dialogue, her dialogue is for the sake of her character, and her character is for the sake of the wit and the wisdom that her many-sided genius is consciously capable and therefore desirous of lavishing on the world. This statement needs some qualifi

She is