We may here, once for all, and very briefly, advert to one specialty of the author’s works, which, if we are right in our interpretation of their central moral import, flows almost necessarily as a corollary from it.  In each of these sketches one principal figure is blotted out just when our regards are fixed most strongly on it.  Milly, Tina, and Mr Tryan all die, at what may well appear the crisis of life and destiny for themselves or others.  There is in this—­if not in specific intention, certainly in practical teaching—­something deeper and more earnest than any mere artistic trick of pathos—­far more real than the weary commonplace of suggesting to us any so-called immortality as the completion and elucidation of earthly life; far profounder and simpler, too, than the only less trite commonplace of hinting to us the mystery of God’s ways in what we call untimely death.  The true import of it we take to be the separation of all the world calls success or reward from the life that is thus seeking its highest fulfilment.  In conformity with the average doctrine of “compensation,” Amos Barton should have appeared before us at last installed in a comfortable living, much respected by his flock, and on good terms with his brethren and well-to-do neighbours around.  With a truer and deeper wisdom, the author places him before us in that brief after-glimpse still a poor, care-worn, bowed-down man, and the sweet daughter-face by his side shows the premature lines of anxiety and sorrow.  Love, anguish, and death, working their true fruits within, bring no success or achievement that the eye can note.  By all the principles of “poetic justice,” Mr Tryan ought to have recovered and married Janet; under the influence of her larger nature to have shaken off his narrownesses; to have lived down all contempt and opposition, and become the respected influential incumbent of the town; and in due time to have toned down from his “enthusiasm of humanity” into the simply earnest, hard-working, and rather commonplace town rector.  Better, because truer, as it is.  Only in the earlier dawn of this higher life of the soul, either in the race or in the individual man; only in the days of the Isaacs and Jacobs of our young humanity, though not with the Abrahams, the Moses’, or the Joshuas even then; only when the soul first begins to apprehend that its true relation to God is to be realised only through the Cross—­is there conscience and habitual “respect unto the recompense” of any reward.

In ‘Adam Bede,’ the first of George Eliot’s more elaborate works, the illustrations of the great moral purpose we have assigned to her are so numerous and varied, that it is not easy to select from among them.  On the one hand, Dinah Morris—­one of the most exquisitely serene and beautiful creations of fiction—­and Seth and Adam Bede present to us, variously modified, the aspect of that life which is aiming toward the highest good.  On the other hand, Arthur Donnithorne and Hetty Sorrel—­poor