debasement and hopeless loss of humanity lies in the path of self-pleasing.  The form of this work, the time and country in which the scene is laid, and the selection of one of the three great actors in it, leads the author more definitely than in almost any of those which preceded it to connect her moral lesson, not merely with Christianity as a religious faith, but with that Church which, as called by the name of Christ, howsoever fallen away from its “first love,” is still, in the very fact of its existence, a witness for Him.  While, on the other hand, through many of its subordinate characters, we have the broad catholic truth kept ever before us, that, irrespective of all formal profession or creed, voluntary acceptance of a higher life-law than the seeking our own interests, pleasure, or will, is, according to its degree, life’s best and highest fulfilment; and thus we trace Him who “pleased not Himself” as the life and the light of the world, even when that world may be least formally acknowledging Him.

The three in whom this great lesson is most prominently illustrated in the work before us are, of course, Romola herself, Tito Melema, and Savonarola.  And in each the illustration is so modified, and, through the three together, so almost exhaustively accomplished, that some examination of each seems necessary to our main object in this survey of George Eliot’s works.

Few, we think, can study the delineation of Romola without feeling that imagination has seldom placed before us a fairer, nobler, and completer female presence.  Perfectly human and natural; unexaggerated, we might almost say unidealised, alike in her weaknesses and her nobleness; combining such deep womanly tenderness with such spotless purity; so transparent in her truthfulness; so clear in her perceptions of the true and good, so firm in her aspirations after these; so broad, gentle, and forbearing in her charity, yet so resolute against all that is mean and base;—­everything fair, bright, and high in womanhood seems to combine in Romola.  So true, also, is the process of her development to what is called nature—­to the laws and principles that regulate human action and life—­that, as it proceeds before us, we almost lose note that there is development.  The fair young heathen first presented to us, linked on to classic times and moralities through all the surroundings of her life, passes on so imperceptibly into the “visible Madonna” of the after-time, that we scarcely observe the change till it is accomplished.  From the first, we know that the mature is involved in the young Romola.  The reason of this is, that from first to last the essential principle of life is in her the same.  Equally, when she first comes before us, and in all the after-glory of her serene unconscious self-devotedness, she is living to others, not to herself.