“Oh, may I join the choir invisible
     In pulses stirred to generosity,
     In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
     For miserable aims that end in self,
     In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
     And, with their mild persistence, urge man’s search
     To vaster issues!”

Tito is a more natural character, good-natured, kind-hearted, with generous impulses.  He is interesting in spite of his faults; he is accomplished, versatile, and brilliant.  But he is inherently selfish, and has no moral courage.  He gradually, in his egotism, becomes utterly false and treacherous, though not an ordinary villain.  He is the creature of circumstances.  His weakness leads to falsehood, and falsehood ends in crime; which crime pursues him with unrelenting vengeance,—­not the agonies of remorse, for he has no conscience, but the vindictive and persevering hatred of his foster father, whom he robbed.  The vengeance of Baldassare is almost preternatural; it surpasses the wrath of Achilles and the malignity of Shylock.  It is the wrath of a demon, from which there is no escape; it would be tragical if the subject of it were greater.  Though Tito perishes in an improbable way, he is yet the victim of the inexorable law of human souls.

But if “Romola” has faults, it has remarkable excellences.  In this book George Eliot aspires to be a teacher of ethics and philosophy.  She is not humorous, but intensely serious and thoughtful.  She sometimes discourses like Epictetus:—­

“And so, my Lillo,” says she at the conclusion, “if you mean to act nobly, and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of man, you must learn to fix your mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it.  And remember, if you were to choose something lower, and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure and escape what is disagreeable, calamity might come just the same; and it would be a calamity falling on a base mind,—­which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it, and that may well make a man say, ’It would have been better for me if I had never been born.’”

Three years elapsed between the publication of “Romola” and that of “Felix Holt,” which shows to what a strain the mind of George Eliot had been subjected in elaborating an historical novel.  She now returns to her own peculiar field, in which her great successes had been made, and with which she was familiar; and yet even in her own field we miss now the genial humanity and inimitable humor of her earlier novels.  In “Felix Holt” she deals with social and political problems in regard to which there is great difference of opinion; for the difficult questions of political economy have not yet been solved.  Felix Holt is a political economist, but not a vulgar radical filled with discontent and envy.  He is a mechanic, tolerably educated, and able to converse with intelligence on the projected