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Of similar style with Adam Bede,' and with no diminution of power or reality, appeared in 1859 The Mill on the Floss,' and in 1861 Silas Marner, not inferior to any of its predecessors. Silas is a weaver, a Dissenter, wronged and injured, a solitary unhappy man. 'You were hard done by once, Mr. Marner, and it seems as if you'll never know the rights of it; but that doesn't hinder there being a rights, Master Marner, for all its dark to you and me.' And this moral is evolved out of a painful but most interesting and powerful story. The fourth novel of the author was of a more ambitious cast: in 1863 was published · Romola,' an historical novel of Italian life in the days of Savonarola, a highly-finished, eloquent, artistic work, and by a select class considered the greatest intellectual effort of the author. It was, however, not so popular as its predecessors, and the author returned to the familiar English scenes. Felix Holt, the Radical,' appeared in 1866. The title, and what by courtesy could be regarded as the main plot, have reference to politics, but most of the incidents and illustrations of character relate to religious and social peculiarities rather than to the party feelings of Tories, Whigs or Radicals. Though inferior in sustained interest to the other English tales of the author, Felix Holt' has passages of great vigour, and some exquisitely drawn characters-we may instance that of Rufus Lyon, a Dissenting minister—and also some fine, pure and natural description. The next novel of this brilliant series was Middlemarch, a Study of English Provincial Life,' 1871-2. In 1976 appeared 'Daniel Deronda,' a story of modern English life. The heroine of this story, a haughty capricious beauty, and some sketches in it of Jewish life and character, are as striking and original and powerfully drawn as anything in modern romance. Besides these prose fictions, George Eliot has sent forth an elaborate dramatic poem, The Gypsy Queen,' 1864, which abounds in subtle philosophical thought, and in scenes and lines of great beauty, yet has no strong prevailing interest. A second poetical work, Agatha, a Poem,' appeared in 1869.

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George Eliot, we may add, is rich in reflective power and in the delineation of character. She also infuses into her writing a deep personal teaching which has laid hold of the most thoughtful, waile hardly militating against the taste of careless or popular readers. This is distinctly seen in her 'Mill on the Floss,' Middlemarch,' and Daniel Deronda.' In these we have a strong belief in the past as a great determining element in character and possibility. The same feature occurs in The Spanish Gypsy,' in which the heroine fails to detach herself from a past that is, in certain respects, opposed to her highest aspirations. George Eliot has skilfully balanced depth of thought with ripe humour and invention. In her latest works she seems fond of drawing into her descriptions scientific and philosophical phrases, which occasionally seem out of place; there is also at times a slight touch of masculine coarseness in her metaphors and illustrations. The exquisite singer falls into a false note! But

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what are these to the fascination of her style and her characters, and her features of English scenery and life? And we may also instance the learning and imagination so prominent and so finely blended in Romola,' which revives Italian life of the time of Savonarola.

Spring-Bright February Days.

Bright February days have a stronger charm of hope about them than any other days in the year. One likes to pause in the mild rays of the sun, and look over the gates at the patient plough horses turning at the end of the furrow, and think that the beautiful year is all before one. The birds seem to feel just the same: their notes are as clear as the clear air. There are no leaves on the trees and hedgerows, but how green all the grassy fields are! and the dark purplish brown of the ploughed earth and of the bare branches is beautiful too. What a glad world this looks like, as one drives or rides along the valleys and over the hills! I have often thought so when in foreign countries, where the fields and woods have looked to me like our English Loamshire the rich land tilled with just as much care, the woods rolling down the gentle slopes to the green meadows. I have come on something by the roadside which has reminded me that I am not in Loamshire: an image of a great agony-the agony of the cross. It has stood perhaps by the cinstering apple blossoms, or on the broad sunshine by the corn-field, or at a turning by the wood where a clear brook was gurgling below; and surely, if there came a traveller to this world who knew nothing of the story of man's life upon it, this image of agony would seem to him strangely out of place in the midst of this joyous nature. He would not know that hidden behind the apple-blossoms, or among the golden corn, or under the shrouding boughs of the wood, there might be a human heart beating heavily with anguish; perhaps a young blooming girl, not knowing where to turn for refuge from swift-adVanchig shame; understanding no more of this life of ours than a foolish lost lamb wandering farther and farther in the nightfall on the lonely heath; yet tasting the bitterest of life's bitterness..

Such things are sometimes hidd n among the sunny fields and behind the blossoming orchards; and the sound of the gurgling brook, if you come close to one spot behind a small bush, would be mingled for your ear with a de- pairing human sob. No worder man's religion has much sorrow in it: no wonder he needs a suffering God.-Adam Bede.

It was in the prime

Of the sweet spring-time.
In the linnet's throat
Trembled the love-note,
And the love-stirred air
Thrilled the blossoms there.
Little shadows danced,
Each a tiny elf,

Happy in large light,

And the thinnest self.

It was but a minute
In a far-off spring,
But each gentle thing,
Sweetly wooing linnet,"
Soft-thrilled hawthor tree
Happy shadowy elf
With the thinnest self,
Love still on in me;

O the sweet, sweet prime
Of the past spring-time.

Spanish Gypsy

Ruined Castles on the Rhine.-From The Mill on The Floss.'

Those ruins on the castled Rhine have crumbled and mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps, that they seem to have a natural fitness, like te mountain piue; nay, even in the day when they were built, they must have had this fitness, as if they had been raised by an earth-born race, who had inherited from their mighty parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of romance! If those robber-barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres, they had a certain grandeur of the wild beast in them-they were forest boars with tusks, tearing and rending, not the ordinary domestic grunter; they represented the demon forces for ever in collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of Life; they made a fine contrast in the picture with the wandering minstrel, the soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse, and the timid Israelite. That was a time of colour, when the sunlight fell on glancing steel and Boating bannere; e time of adventure and fierce struggle

nay, of living religious art and religious enthusiasm: for were not cathedrals built in those days, and did not great emperors leave their western palaces to die before the infidel strongholds in the East! Therefore it is that these Rhine castles thrill me with a sense of poetry; they belong to the grand historic lite of humanity, and raise up for me the vision of an epoch. But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed angular skeletons of villages on the Rhine oppress me with the feeling that human life very much of it is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of, were part of a gros sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers.

Saint Theresa.-Unfulfilled Aspirations.-From Middlemarch.'

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behave under the varying experiments of time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumned romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet, and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape ther thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born heresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardour alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women; if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile, the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favourite love stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond. and never finds the living stream in fellowship with his own oary-footed kind.. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart beats and sobs after an unattained goodness, tremble off, and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some longrecognisable deed.

Detached Thoughts.

Comprehensive talkers are apt to be tiresome when we are nct athirst for information, but, to be quite fair, we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to the lack of matter. Speech is often harren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on on addled nes - pg; and when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

All knowledge which alters our lives, penetrates us more when it comes in the early morning: the day that has to be travelled with something new, and perhaps for ever sad in its light, is an image of the life that spreads beyon. But at night the time of rest is near.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it—if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring, that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass-the same redbreasts that we used to call God's birds, because they do no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?

O the anguish of that thought, that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we shewed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God has given us to know!

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters. Melodies die out like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.

The finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as light,' sound,' stars,'' music'-words really not worth looking at, or hearing in hemselves, any more than chips' or 'sawdust: it is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful.

MRS. CRAIK (MISS MULOCK).

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In 1849 appeared 'The Ogilvies'—- a first novel,' as the authoress timidly announced, but without giving her name. It was instantly successful, and appreciated as a work of genius, written with deep earnestness, and pervaded by a deep and noble philosophy.' The accomplished lady who had thus delighted and benefited society by her 'first novel' was DINAH MARIA MULOCK, born at Stoke-upon-Trent, Staffordshire. The success of her story soon led to others, and we subjoin a list of the works of this authoress-a list which gives a picture of a wonderfully active literary career and prolific genius: NOVELS: The Ogilvies,' 1849; Olive,' 1850; The Head of the Family,' 1851; Agatha's Husband,' 1853; John Halifax' 1857; A Life for a Life,' 1859; Mistress and Maid,' 1863; Christian's Mistake,' 1865; A Noble Life,' 1866; Two Marriages,' 1867; The Woman's Kingdom,' 1869; A Brave Lady,' 1870; Hannah,' 1871. MISCELLANEOUS WORKS: 'Avillion and other Tales,' 1853; 'Nothing New,' 1857; A Woman's Thoughts about Woman,' 185; 'Studies from Life,' 1861; The Unkind Word and other Stories,' 1870; 'Fair France,' 1871; 'Sermons Out of Church.' CHILDREN'S Books: 'Alice Learmont, a Fairy Tale;' 'Rhoda's Lessons,' 'Cola Monti,' A Hero,' 'Bread upon the Waters,' 'The Little Lychetts,' 'Michael the Miner,' 'Our Year,' 'Little Sunshine's Holiday,' ' Adventures of a Brownie.' Besides the above, this authoress has written a number of poetical pieces, and translated several works.

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In 1865 Miss Mulock was married to Mr. George Lillie Craik, publisher, son of the Rev. Dr. Craik, Glasgow, and nephew of Professor Craik. As a moral teacher, none of the novelists of the present day excels Mrs. Craik. She is not formally didactic-she insinuates in

struction. A too prolonged feminine softness and occasional senti ́mentalism constitute the defects of her novels, though less prominent in her later works than in her first two novels. Her mission, it has justly been remarked, is to shew how the trials, perplexities, joys, sorrows, labours, and successes of life deepen or wither the character according to its inward bent-how continued insincerity giaitally darkens and corrupts the life-springs of the mind-and how every event, adverse or fortunate, tends to strengthen and expand a high mind, and to break the springs of a selfish or even merely weak and self-indulgent nature.'* In carrying out this moral purpose, Mrs. Craik displays eloquence, pathos, a subdued but genial humour, and happy delineation of character. Of all her works, John Halifax' (of which the eighteenth edition is now before us) is the greatest favourite, and is indeed a noble story of English domestic life.

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Death of Muriel, the Blind Child.-From John Halifax.'

John opened the large Book-the Book he had taught all his children to long for and to love and read out of it their favourite history of Joseph and his brethren. The mother sat by him at the fireside, rocking Maud softly on her knees. Edwin and Walter settled themselves on the hearth-rug, with great eyes intently fixed on their father. From behind him the candle-light fell softly down on the motionless figure in the bed, whose hand he held, and whose face he ever now and then turned to look at-then, satisfied, continued to read. In the reading his voice had a fatherly, flowing calm-as Jacob's might have had. when the children were tender,' and he gathered them all round him under the palm-trees of Succoth-years before he cried unto the Lord that bitter cry (which John hurried over as he read): · If I am bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.'

For an hour, nearly, we all sat thus, with the wind coming up the valley, howling in the beech-wood, and shaking the casement as it passed outside. Within. the only sound was the father's voice. This ceased at last; he shut the Bible, and put it aside. The group-that last perfect household picture-was broken up. It melted away into things of the past, and became only a picture for evermore.

Now. boys. it is full time to say good-night. There, go and kiss your sister.' Which ?' said Edwin. in his funny way. We've got two now; and I don't know which is the biggest baby." I'll thrash you if you say that again' cried Guy. Which, indeed! Mand is but the baby. Muriel will be always sister.' "Sister,' faintly laughed as she answered his fond kiss-Guy was oft n thought to be her favourite brotuer. Now, off with you, boys; and go down-stairs quietly-mind, I say quietly.'

They obeyed-that is, as literally as boy-nature can obey such an admonition. But an hour after, I heard Goy and Edwin arguing vociferously in the dark, on the respective mer ts and future treatment of their two sisters, Muriel and Maud.

John and I sat up late fogether that night. He could not rest, even though he told me he had left the mother and her two daughters as cosy as a nest of woodpigeons. We listened to the wild night, till it had almost how ed itself away; then our fire went out. and we came and sat over the last fagot in Mrs. Tod's kitchen, the old Debateable Land We began talking of the long-ago time, and not of this tine at all The vivid present-never out of either mind for an instant- we in our conversation did not touch upon, by at least ten years Nor did we give expression to a thought which strongly oppressed me, and which I once or twice fancied I could detect in John likewise: how very like this night seemed to the night when Mr. March died; the same silentness in the house, the same windy whirl without, the same blaze of the wood-fire on the same kitchen ceiling. More than once I could almost have deluded myself that I heard the faint moans and footsteps overhead;

• North British Review, November 1833,

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