the laws.  It has been held hitherto that a man can be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has much money and comfort to lose.  But a better state of things would be, that men who had little money and not much comfort should still be guardians of order, because they had sense to see that disorder would do no good, and had a heart of justice, pity and fortitude to keep them from making more misery only because they felt some misery themselves.  There are thousands of artisans who have already shown this fine spirit, and have endured much with patient heroism.  If such a spirit spread and penetrated us all, we should soon become the masters of the country in the best sense and to the best ends.  For, the public order being preserved, there can be no government in future that will not be determined by our insistence on our fair and practicable demands.  It is only by disorder that our demands will be choked, that we shall find ourselves lost amongst a brutal rabble, with all the intelligence of the country opposed to us, and see government in the shape of guns that will sweep us down in the ignoble martyrdom of fools.

The eighteen essays published as the Impressions of Theophrastus Such purport to have been the work of a bachelor of singular habits and tastes, who had written a book which proved a failure, and who left this volume to appear posthumously.  He had been in the habit of giving an account to himself of the characters he met with, and he begins his book by describing his own weaknesses.  He classes himself as one of the blunderers he would portray, as having the faults and foibles he finds in others.  Expressively the author says, “If the human race has a bad reputation, I perceive that I cannot escape being compromised.”  This may be taken as the sentiment of George Eliot herself; and it is she who really speaks in these words concerning the satirical criticisms of those she describes: 

If I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavors in a rashly chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you:  the more intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the proof that I share them.  How otherwise could I get the discernment?—­for even what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have shaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think of exorcising it.  No man can know his brother simply as a spectator.

After the second essay Theophrastus disappears, and no further hint is given that it is he who is the reputed author.  This slight fictitious machinery is too weak to carry the load put upon it.  The reader soon feels that it is George Eliot who is talking, and the opinions put forth, the sentiments expressed, are recognized as her own.  Indeed, it would have been better, so the reader may probably come to say