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 characters slightly gnarled and knotted by natural circumstances, as trees are that are twisted and misshapen by storms a d floodsor 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," or "wrestles " unavailingly "with universal pressure.

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 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 man 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 brilliant success in dissecting motive and analyzing feeling. They deserve as great renown as "Nellaton'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 has 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 "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?"

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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 dinning-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 "our moral sense learn the manners of good society?"

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 writings. 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 her pages. 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. The lancet-edged sarcasms fall copiously and blisteringly, but they drop on the heads that deserve them with undeniable precision. Who can object to this: "Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them wofully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.' Is it not one of the "mixed results of revivals" that "some gain a religious vocabulary rather than a religious experience ?" Is there a descendant of the Puritans who will not relish the fair play of this: "They might give the name of piety to much that was only Puritanic egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin, but they had at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and color-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total blindness, which sees no distinction of color at all." Is not Adam Bede justified in saying that "to hear some preachers you'd think a man must be doing nothing all his life but shutting his eyes and looking at what's going on in the inside of him," or that "the doctrines are like finding names for your feelings so that you can talk of them when you've never known them?" Read all she has said before you object to anything she has said. Then see whether you will find fault with her for delineating the motives of those with whonf "great illusions" are mistaken for "great faith "; or those "whose celestial intimacies do not improve their domestic manners," however "holy" they may claim to be; or those who "contrive to conciliate the consciousness of filthy rags with the best damask;" of those "whose imitative piety and native worldliness is equally sincere;" of those who "think the invisible powers will be soothed by a bland parenthesis here and there, coming from a man of property "--parenthetical recognition of the Almighty! May not "religious scruples be like split needles, making one afraid of treading or sitting down, or even eating?"

But if this is a great mind fascinated with the insoluble enigma of human motives, it is a mind profoundly in sympathy with those

who are puzzling hopelessly over the riddle or are struggling hopelessly in its toils. She is "on a level and in the press with them as they struggle their way along the stony road through the crowd of unloving fellow-men. She says "the only true knowledge of our fellows is that which enables us to feel with them, which gives us a finer ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstances and opinion." No artist in fiction ever had a finer ear or a more human sympathy for the struggler who "pushes manfully on" and "falls at last," leaving "the crowd to close over the space he has left." Her extraordinary skill in disclosing the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts which constitute a man's critical actions," only makes her the more charitable in judg ing them. "Until we know what this combination has been, or will be, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about" the character that results. "There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change. And for this reason the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right." There is nothing of the spirit of "served him right," or "just what she deserved," or "they ought to have known better,' in George Eliot. That is not in her line. The opposite of that is exactly in her line. This is characteristic of her. In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have no picturesque or sentimental wretchedness! And it is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. She does not leave them out. Her books are full of them, and of a Christly charity and plea for them. Who can ever forget little Tiny, "hidden and uncared for as the pulse of anguish in the breast of the bird that has fluttered down to its nest with the long-sought food, and has found the nest torn and empty?" There is nothing in fiction to surpass in pathos the picture of the death of Mrs. Amos Barton. George Eliot's fellow-feeling comes of the habit she ascribes to Daniel Deronda, "the habit of thinking herself imaginatively into the experience of others." That is the reason why her novels come home so profoundly to those who have had a deep experience of human life. These are the men and women whom she fascinates and alienates. I know strong men and brave women who are afraid of her books, and say so. It is because of her realness, her unrelenting fidelity to human nature and human life. It is because the analysis is so delicate, subtle and far-in. Hence the atmosphere of sadness that pervades her pages. It was unavoidable. To see only the behavior, as Dickens did, amuses us; to study only the motive at the root of the behavior, as George Eliot does, saddens us. The humor of Mrs. Poyser and the wit of Mrs. Transome only deepen the pathos by relieving it. There is hardly a sarcasm in these books but has its pensive undertone. It is all in the

key of "The Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon"; and that would be an appropriate key for a requiem over the grave of George Eliot.

She will write no more, but no more was needed. She might have added to the amount of her achievements, but she could not have added to their excellence or renown. She has left behind writings on the enigma of the human heart that will be read with ever-increasing appreciation and amazement so long as the language which they adorn shall continue to endure. NATHAN SHEPPARD.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO.

MY DEAR

-: You remind me of a promise which I have left too long unfulfilled. We had been looking over some of your old family papers, and we had found among them a copy of the once famous Tract 90, scored over with pencil marks and interjections. The rocket which had once flamed across the sky was now a burntout case. It was hard to believe that the whole mind of England could have been so agitated by expressions and ideas which had since become so familiar. We were made to feel how times had changed in the last forty years; we had been traveling on a spiritual railroad, and the indifference with which we turned the leaves of the once-terrible pamphlet was an evidence how far we had left behind our old traditionary landmarks. Mysteries which had been dismissed as superstitions at the Reformation, and had never since been heard of, were now preached again by half the clergy, and had revolutionized the ritual in our churches. Every county had its Anglican monasteries and convents. Romanism had lifted up its head again. It had its hierarchy and its cardinals; it was a power in Parliament and in the London salons. The fathers confessors were busy in our families, dictating conditions of marriages, dividing wives from husbands and children from parents.

By the side of the revival of Catholicism there was a corresponding phenomenon of an opposite and no less startling kind. Half a century ago any one who openly questioned the truth of Christianity was treated as a public offender, and was excommunicated by society. Now, while one set of men were bringing back mediævalism, science and criticism were assailing with impunity the authority of the Bible; miracles were declared impossible; even Theism itself was treated as an open question, and subjects which in our fathers' time were approached only with the deepest reverence and solemnity were discussed among the present generation with as much freedom as the common problems of natural philosophy or politics.