How the solemn, splendid Past
    O’er thy early widened earth
  Made grandeur, as on sunset cast
    Dark elms near take mighty girth. 
      Hands and feet were tiny still
      When we knew the historic thrill,
      Breathed deep breath in heroes dead,
      Tasted the immortals’ bread.

In expressive sentences, in the development of her characters, and in many other ways, she affirms this faith in tradition.  In one of the mottoes in Felix Holt she uses a fine sentence, which is repeated in “A Minor Prophet.”

  Our finest hope is finest memory.

The finest hope of the race is to be found in memory of its great deeds, as its saddest loss is to be found in forgetfulness of a noble past.  In The Mill on the Floss, when describing St. Ogg’s, she attributes its sordid and tedious life to its neglect of the past and its inspiring memories.

The mind of St. Ogg’s did not look extensively before or after.  It inherited a long past without thinking of it, and had no eyes for the spirits that walk the streets, Since the centuries when St. Ogg with his boat, and the Virgin Mother at the prow, had been seen on the wide water, so many memories had been left behind, and had gradually vanished like the receding hill-tops!  And the present time was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes, thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the giant forces that used to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep.  The days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change it:  the Catholics were formidable because they would lay hold of government and property, and burn men alive; not because any sane and honest parishioner of St. Ogg’s could be brought to believe in the Pope.  One aged person remembered how a rude multitude had been swayed when John Wesley preached in the cattle-market; but for a long while it had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of men.  An occasional burst of fervor in Dissenting pulpits on the subject of infant baptism was the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober times when men had done with change.  Protestantism sat at ease, unmindful of schisms, careless of proselytism; Dissent was an inheritance along with a superior pew and a business connection; and Churchmanship only wondered contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish habit that clung greatly to families in the grocery and chandlering lines, though not incompatible with prosperous wholesale dealing. [Footnote:  Chapter XII.]

This faith in tradition, as giving the basis of all our best life, is perhaps nowhere so expressively set forth by George Eliot as in The Spanish Gypsy.  It is distinctly taught by all the best characters in the words they speak, and it is emphatically taught in the whole purpose and spirit of the poem.  Zarca says his tribe has no great life because it has no great national memories.  He calls his people