In another five years George Eliot produced “Daniel Deronda,” the last and most unsatisfactory of her great novels, written in feeble health and with exhausted nervous energies, as she was passing through the shadows of the evening of her life.  In this work she doubtless essayed to do her best; but she could not always surpass herself, any more than could Scott or Dickens.  Nor is she to be judged by those productions which reveal her failing strength, but by those which were written in the fresh enthusiasm of a lofty soul.  No one thinks the less of Milton because the “Paradise Regained” is not equal to the “Paradise Lost.”  Many are the immortal poets who are now known only for two or three of their minor poems.  It takes a Michael Angelo to paint his grandest frescos after reaching eighty years of age; or a Gladstone, to make his best speeches when past the age of seventy.  Only people with a wonderful physique and unwasted mental forces can go on from conquering to conquer,—­people, moreover, who have reserved their strength, and lived temperate and active lives.

Although “Daniel Deronda” is occasionally brilliant, and laboriously elaborated, still it is regarded generally by the critics as a failure.  The long digression on the Jews is not artistic; and the subject itself is uninteresting, especially to the English, who have inveterate prejudices against the chosen people.  The Hebrews, as they choose to call themselves, are doubtless a remarkable people, and have marvellously preserved their traditions and their customs.  Some among them have arisen to the foremost rank in scholarship, statesmanship, and finance.  They have entered, at different times, most of the cabinets of Europe, and have held important chairs in its greatest universities.  But it was a Utopian dream that sent Daniel Deronda to the Orient to collect together the scattered members of his race.  Nor are enthusiasts and proselytes often found among the Jews.  We see talent, but not visionary dreamers.  To the English they appear as peculiarly practical,—­bent on making money, sensual in their pleasures, and only distinguished from the people around them by an extravagant love of jewelry and a proud and cynical rationalism.  Yet in justice it must be confessed, that some of the most interesting people in the world are Jews.

In “Daniel Deronda” the cheerless philosophy of George Eliot is fully brought out.  Mordecai, in his obscure and humble life, is a good representative of a patient sufferer, but “in his views and aspirations is a sort of Jewish Mazzini.”  The hero of the story is Mordecai’s disciple, who has discovered his Hebrew origin, of which he is as proud as his aristocratic mother is ashamed The heroine is a spoiled woman of fashion, who makes the usual mistake of most of George Eliot’s heroines, in violating conscience and duty.  She marries a man whom she knows to be inherently depraved and selfish; marries him for his money, and pays the usual