weakness to strength, or from strength to weakness, according to the works that they do and the thoughts that they cherish.  In Romola, for instance, Tito, as we first meet him, may be either good or bad, and we know not whether he will finally turn to the right hand or to the left.  As time passes, we see him degenerate steadily because he follows his selfish impulses, while Romola, whose character is at first only faintly indicated, grows into beauty and strength with every act of self-renunciation.

In these two characters, Tito and Romola, we have an epitome of our author’s moral teaching.  The principle of law was in the air during the Victorian era, and we have already noted how deeply Tennyson was influenced by it.  With George Eliot law is like fate; it overwhelms personal freedom and inclination.  Moral law was to her as inevitable, as automatic, as gravitation.  Tito’s degeneration, and the sad failure of Dorothea and Lydgate in Middlemarch, may be explained as simply as the fall of an apple, or as a bruised knee when a man loses his balance.  A certain act produces a definite moral effect on the individual; and character is the added sum of all, the acts of a man’s; life,—­just as the weight of a body is the sum of the weights of many different atoms which constitute it.  The matter of rewards and punishments, therefore, needs no final judge or judgment, since these things take care of themselves automatically in a world of inviolable moral law.

Perhaps one thing more should be added to the general characteristics of George Eliot’s novels,—­they are all rather depressing.  The gladsomeness of life, the sunshine of smiles and laughter, is denied her.  It is said that once, when her husband remarked that her novels were all essentially sad, she wept, and answered that she must describe life as she had found it.

WHAT TO READ.  George Eliot’s first stories are in some respects her best, though her literary power increases during her second period, culminating in Silas Marner, and her psychological analysis is more evident in Daniel Deronda.  On the whole, it is an excellent way to begin with the freshness and inspiration of the Scenes of Clerical Life and read her books in the order in which they were written.  In the first group of novels Adam Bede is the most natural, and probably interests more readers than all the others combined. The Mill on the Floss has a larger personal interest, because it reflects much of George Eliot’s history and the scenes and the friends of her early life.  The lack of proportion in this story, which gives rather too much space to the girl-and-boy experiences, is naturally explained by the tendency in every man and woman to linger over early memories.