“Justice,” says the author, as the dead Tito is borne past still locked in the death-clutch of the human avenger—­“justice is like the kingdom of God:  it is not without us as a fact; it is within us as a great yearning.”  In these solemn truthful words we have suggested to us how feebly mere physical death can shadow forth that spiritual corruption, that “second death,” which we have seen hour by hour consummating in him who has lived for self alone.

Few of the great figures which stand up amid the dimness of medieval history are more perplexing to historian and biographer than Savonarola.  On a first glance we seem shut up to one or other of two alternatives—­regarding him as an apostle and martyr, or as a charlatan.  And even more careful examination leaves in his character and life anomalies so extraordinary, contradictions so inextricable, that most historians have fallen back on the hypothesis of partial insanity—­the insanity born of an honest and upright but extravagant fanaticism—­as the only one adequate to explain the mystery.  Whether George Eliot has in this work produced a more satisfactory solution, we do not attempt formally to determine.  We are sure, however, that every thoughtful reader will recognise that the solution she offers is one in strict and deep consistency with all the laws of human action, and all the tendencies of human imperfection; and that the Savonarola she places before us is a being we can understand by sympathy—­sympathy at once with the greatness of his aims, and still more fully with the weaknesses that lead him astray.

The picture is a very impressive one, alike in its grandeur and in its sadness, speaking its true, deep, universal lesson home to us and to our life:  alike when it shows us the strength and nobleness of life attuning itself to the highest good, and battling on toward the highest right; and when it shows us how self, under a form which does not seem self, may steal in to sap its strength and to abase its nobleness.

The great Monk-prophet comes upon the scene a new “voice crying in the wilderness” of selfishness and wrong around him—­an impassioned witness that “there is a God that judgeth in the earth,” protesting by speech and by life against the self-seeking and self-pleasing he sees on every side.  To the putting down of this, to the living his own life, to the rousing all men to live theirs, not to pleasure, but to God; merging all private interests in the public good, and that the best good; looking each one not to his own pleasures, ambition, or ease, but to that which shall best advance a reign of truth, justice, and love on earth,—­to this end he has consecrated himself and all his powers.  The path thus chosen is for himself a hard one; circumstanced as our humanity is, it never has been otherwise—­never shall be so while these heavens and this earth remain.  Mere personal self-denials, mere turning away from the outward pomps and vanities of the world, lie very