and aim save to die, repentant and absolved, for the country and faith he had abjured.  The self-assertion, too, of love is gone, and only its deep purity and tenderness remain.  Without murmur or remonstrance, he acquiesces in the doom of hopeless separation; accepting all that remains possible to him of that “high allegiance higher than our love,” which is thenceforth the only bond of union between these two.  In that last sad interview with her for whom he had so fearfully sinned, and so all but utterly fallen, we can regard Don Silva with a fuller and truer sympathy than we dare accord to him in all the height of his greatness, and all the wealth, beauty, and joy of his yet unshadowed love.

* * * * *

In the next of this series of great works, and the one which to many of her readers is and will remain the most fascinating—­’Middlemarch’—­George Eliot has stretched a broader and more crowded canvas, on which, however, every figure, to the least important that appears, is—­not sketched or outlined, but—­filled in with an intense and lifelike vividness and precision that makes each stand out as if it stood there alone.  Quote but a few words from any one of the speakers, and we know in a moment who that speaker is.  And each is the type or representative of a class; we have no monsters or unnatural creations among them.  To a certain extent all are idealised for good or for evil,—­it cannot be otherwise in fiction without its ceasing to be fiction; but the essential elements of character and life in all are not peculiar to them, but broad and universal as our humanity itself.  Dorothea and her sister, Mr Brooke and Sir James Chettam, Rosamond Vincy and her brother, Mr Vincy and his wife, Casaubon and Lydgate, Farebrother and Ladislaw, Mary Garth and her parents, Bulstrode and Raffles, even Drs Sprague and Minchin, old Featherstone and his kindred—­all are but representative men and women, with whose prototypes every reader, if gifted with the subtle power of penetration and analysis of George Eliot, might claim personal acquaintance.

This richly-crowded canvas presents to us such variety of illustration of the two great antagonistic principles of human life—­self-pleasing and self-abnegation, love of pleasure and the love of God more or less absolute and consummate—­that it is no easy task to select from among them.  But two figures stand out before us, each portrayed with such finished yet unlaboured art—­living, moving, talking before us—­contrasted with such exquisite yet unobtrusive delicacy, and so subtilely illustrating the two great phases of human inspiration and life—­that which centres in self, and that which yearns and seeks to lose itself in the infinite of truth, purity, and love—­that instinctively and irresistibly the mind fixes upon them.  These are Dorothea and Rosamond Vincy.