The

She

in relation to the emotional wants and capacities of an ardent girl, he was as ignorant as that worst of fools, a learned fool; and he honestly believed that she could be made happy, not by sharing his intellectual ambition, or in being trained by him to intellectual strength, but through the privilege of jotting down his ruminations, and being thus of service to him and to the human race. stinging and fatal point was that, in his estimate of the female intellect in general, and of Dorothea's intellect in particular, Casaubon was coldly and invincibly common-place. Without intending to pain-by incidental, inevitable remarks and lookshe let her know that she was to be simply his amanuensis, and that intellectual companionship was not even to be imagined. Dorothea was a true woman, and had her share of intellectual vanity. was a girl of genius, conscious of perfect ability to understand anything Casaubon would deign to teach her. She was, therefore, mortified beyond expression to find herself silently but inexorably snubbed. The disenchantment would not have been so desperate, had the vanishing of her hope of an ideal friendship been accompanied by the experience of Casaubon as a kind and caressing husband. Could she, with all her high-flown ambitions, have said, "Well, he is very fond of me, and pets me, and likes me to kiss him and make much of him," she might have been happy, or might at least have escaped being miserable. But a bachelor of forty-five, who has never had a love-affair-you might as well expect tenderness from a chalk bust of Aristotle! Casaubon had no encouragement for Dorothea's "girlish and womanly feeling." He could not take her hands between his and listen, with the delight of tenderness and understanding, to the "little histories" of her experience. He could bestow on her none of those "childlike caresses which are the bent of every true woman, who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own love." There is nothing finer in "Middlemarch" than the subtle discrimination in virtue of which George Eliot draws Dorothea, despite her intellectual aspiration, not as a prig in petticoats, but as a darling, bird-like, womanlike girl. "With all her yearning to know what was afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardour enough for what was near, to have kissed Mr. Casaubon's coat-sleeve, or to have caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made any other sign of acceptance than pronouncing her, with his unfailing propriety, to be of a most affectionate and truly feminine nature, indicating at the same time, by politely reaching a chair for her, that he regarded these manifestations as rather crude and startling. Having made his clerical toilette with due care in the morning, he was prepared only for those amenities of life which were suited to the well-adjusted

stiff cravat of the period, and to a mind weighted with unpublished matter." Life with such a man soon began to be intolerable.

And then there was Will Ladislaw. Mr. Casaubon, looking with deep-sunk, glassy eyes from his mummy case, could not help perceiving that Dorothea was interested by this young gentleman. Will is a youth of that kind which benevolent nature seems to have provided for the special purpose of discomfiting pedants. He sees at a glance that Casaubon is a pretentious humbug, and he regards Dorothea with a reverent enthusiasm which is almost too closely allied to worship to be called love. A thorough gentleman, he does not utter a word of intentional or unfair disparagement respecting Casaubon in her hearing, but yet she learns that her intellectual idol is in his opinion a mere graven image, and the contagion of Will's absolute faith on this point is promoted by the circumstance that a faint suspicion has crossed her own mind that her husband is, even intellectually, a humbug. The truth is that, as overfeeding destroys an athlete, excessive reading had destroyed Casaubon's productive power, and dulled his spiritual enthusiasm. His manhood was passing away, and he was still accumulating material, elaborating argument, for his great work. Dorothea ventured to drop a hint as to the desirability of his actually beginning its composition, and gave deep offence by her presumption. Will Ladislaw had, in his frank, unthinking way, made her aware of his conviction that Mr. Casaubon, not reading German, was behind the world in his own department. Poor Dorothea saw not only her own intellectual ideal fade, but lost even the poor compensation of knowing that the man to whom she had sacrificed herself was really great. Respecting Will she had not a thought inconsistent with pure and perfect wifehood, but she could not help admiring and liking him. She found that her husband inherited a large amount of property which ought to have belonged to Ladislaw ; attempted to induce her husband to make over to Will what honour pronounced his although law denied it him; and, meeting with a cold and peremptory refusal, was thus placed at a greater distance from Casaubon, and drawn nearer to Will. He is a brilliant, handsome, clever, good-hearted youth, whose philosophy and religion are those of Pope's universal prayer and Goethe's songs. Casaubon dies of heart-complaint, and it then appears that his cold, implacable, jealous spite against Ladislaw-like a snake coiled up in the heart of a mummy-had carried him into an act of which no gentleman would have been capable. In a codicil to his will he forbade Dorothea, in the event of his death, to marry Ladislaw, under penalty of losing all the property she inherits from him. Of course, as any one but a learned fool would have seen, this makes Dorothea only the more willing to marry Ladislaw.

Casaubon, as Mrs. Cadwallader remarked, " made himself disagreeable—or it pleased God to make him so—and then he dared her to contradict him. It's the way to make any trumpery tempting, to ticket it at a high price in that way." From first to last, however, Dorothea continues to enjoy our perfect approval. Simple as a child, tender, kind, sincere, and all that is womanly in the best of women, she is intensely real, and yet one of the most ideally beautiful and fascinating characters in the whole range of fictitious literature.

We have done little more than touch upon one of the groups which breathe and speak upon the crowded canvas of "Middlemarch." The book is like a rich drapery on which many figures, many distinct groups with their separate histories, are embroidered. The loves of Lydgate and of Rosamond-he honourable, brave, and talented, she worldly and shallow; and the loves of Fred Vincy and of Mary Garth-he frivolous, and somewhat selfish, but not at heart bad; she resolute, constant, and sensible-are told at not much less length than those of Casaubon, Ladislaw, and Dorothea. Some of the figures remind us of earlier works of George Eliot. Mr. Farebrother is a reflection of the Parson Irwin of "Adam Bede." Mrs. Dollop reminds us of Mrs. Poyser. Raffles looks as if he had lost his way out of some book of Dickens. He is, however, but a slight sketch; and Peter Featherstone, the other totally wicked character in the book, appears only on his deathbed and as exhibited in his will. Bulstrode, the Evangelical banker, is a mixed character, the bad elements in him very strong, but never quite extinguishing the good. He has been sincerely religious in his youth, but has been led by greed of gain into grievous sin, and aggravates his guilt by an ostentatious profession of religion, and assumption of superiority to other men. George Eliot carefully avoids conventional satire against religion, and instead of painting Bulstrode with broad sweeps of lamp-black, as a commonplace novelist would have done, shows the subtle blending in him of light and shade, of good and evil. It is a supremely beautiful touch that his wife is described as remaining true and attached to him. The "Look up, Nicholas" with which she awakes him from his stupor of shame and sorrow, is one of the finest strokes that ever came from the pen of George Eliot.

The ethical tone of " Middlemarch" is higher than that of any of the author's previous books, with the dubious exception of "Silas Marner." It has been already said that the ideal aspiration of Dorothea ends in disappointment, but this does not amount to an admission that the book teaches the folly or impossibility of ideal nobleness, inasmuch as Dorothea's right-heartedness and elevated views of life enable her to realise, in spite of obstructions, a

happy and a noble life. "Be true, and kind, and pure, and the simplest paths of existence will have for you an ideal light shed upon them,"-such is the doctrine of the book. There is not in it a trace of polemical attack upon received faiths, unless it be considered such to pronounce the religion of fear the religion of a savage and uncultivated mind. George Eliot assuredly believes

with Burns that

The fear of hell's a hangman's whip

To keep the wretch in order;

but we have yet to learn that mere terror can make any one a Christian. Whatever she may hold as her own philosophical opinion, George Eliot has nothing in "Middlemarch" to say against any man's Christianity if only he will live up to it. She tells society that, in its marrying and giving in marriage, in its making and spending of fortunes, it acts upon "rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly-asserted beliefs." If she has anything to teach incompatible with Christianity no one will learn the fact from "Middlemarch;" but every reader of the book must see that she endeavours to bring society somewhat nearer to the Christian ideal.

We have not referred to the snatches of verse, rhymed and unrhymed, which occur, either at the beginnings of chapters or elsewhere. Many of them are very striking, and almost all are racy and felicitous. The book is one of the masterpieces of English fiction, and the least that can be said of it is that, since the death of Thackeray, no such novel has appeared in the language. PETER BAYNE.

THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE.

BY THE EDITOR.

CHAPTER XLI.-CHANGES AT ST. MILDred's.

ANOTHER year passed away, and there was a baby at the Woodlands! Mr. Pettifer had fondly anticipated a son and heir; Sarah had disappointed him by bringing into the world a little daughter; "but," said Mr. Pettifer, when he called early one morning on Miss Gruesome Greenway to announce the fact of his paternity, "we must be content with what Providence assigns; let us hope it will be one of the right sort next time!"

And truly, so far, the Rev. Charles might well be content with the assignments of Providence. He was much altered since the

humble Bellevue days. The Woodlands air seemed to suit him exactly; he grew stout, and sleek, and consequential; for his churchwardens bowed down before him, tradesmen were obsequious, and of creature comforts he had his fill. He dressed in handsome clerical costume; and somehow his coats grew longer, his waistcoats higher in the neck, his white cravat of decidedly unevangelical fashion! The fact being that his "views" were undergoing a most decided change; he was both feeling and evincing certain proclivities towards the High Church.

It was rumoured,-whether truthfully or untruthfully I have no idea, that Dean Close, when promoted to his deanery, declared to his friends that he found himself growing "higher and higher every day!" That Dean Close ever said anything of the kind is most unlikely, though it was whispered about, with sighs and groans, in certain Evangelical circles, as an undoubted and greatly-to-bedeplored fact. But Mr. Pettifer really did confide to his horrified wife that he was daily becoming more and more disposed towards "" a moderate High Churchism!" As I said before, he affected the extreme clerical in his dress; he took a violent dislike to his Geneva gown, and nearly threw the spinsters of St. Mildred's into fits by preaching in his surplice on Advent Sunday.

It was "the Mark of the Beast," they declared! But little he cared for that! He would not have ventured in days past to outrage the opinions of the dominant members of his congregation: he kept his self-assertion chiefly for No. 10, Bellevue, where he could exercise it securely, and without any fear of consequences. It was another thing now: he was a rich man, immensely rich, and, though poverty and imperious assumption will never be permitted to go hand in hand, unlimited wealth, either real or supposed, may be as insolent and arrogant as it pleases. And it did please Mr. Pettifer to "take upon himself," as people said; and he made the churchwardens his creatures, and taught them the duty of submission to priestly authority.

Yes! "priestly!" It had come to that! The Rev. Charles Pettifer called himself an Anglican priest! and he was seriously offended when ignorantly classed with Evangelicals. Sarah still read the Record; but her husband took in the Guardian, and he not unfrequently seized the Record, if he found it lying about, crumpled it up, and tossed it away, or actually threw it into the fire. He did this once, when his wife was present. She rushed to the rescue; but it was too late-the offending paper had blazed up the chimney. "What can you mean?" she asked, angrily.

"I mean that I will not have that foolish Record in my house any longer. It is more than foolish : it is impious, scandalous, and blasphemous ! "