“That is not easy, my Lille.  It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures.  We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.  There are so many things wrong and difficult in the world that no man can be great—­he can hardly keep himself from wickedness—­unless he gives up thinking much about pleasures or rewards, and gets strength to endure what is hard and painful.  My father had the greatness that belongs to integrity; he chose poverty and obscurity rather than falsehood.  And there was Fra Girolamo—­you know why I keep to-morrow sacred; he had the greatness which belongs to a life spent in struggling against powerful wrong, and in trying to raise men to the highest deeds they are capable of, And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of men, 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 from what is disagreeable, calamity might come just the same; and it would be 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.’  I will tell you something, Lillo.”

    Romola paused a moment.  She had taken Lillo’s cheeks between her hands,
    and his young eyes were meeting hers.

“There was a man to whom I was very near, so that I could see a great deal of his life, who made almost every one fond of him, for he was young, and clever, and beautiful, and his manners to all were gentle and kind.  I believe when I first knew him, he never thought of anything cruel or base.  But because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as his own safety, he came at last to commit some of the basest deeds—­such as make men infamous.  He denied his father, and left him to misery; he betrayed every trust that was reposed in him, that he might keep himself safe and get rich and prosperous.  Yet calamity overtook him.”

Aside from this altruistic teaching which is developed in connection with the life of Romola, the doctrine of retribution is vigorously unfolded in the history of Tito Melema.  The effects of selfishness and personal self-seeking have nowhere been so wonderfully studied by George Eliot as in this character.  His career is minutely traced from step to step of his downfall, and with a remarkable faithfulness and