which has nothing but negatives to utter. Not, of course, if the conformity would be accompanied by a consciousness of hypocrisy.  That is a question for the individual conscience to settle.  But there is enough to be said on the different points of view from which conformity may be regarded, to hinder a ready judgment against those who continue to conform after ceasing to believe in the ordinary sense.  But with the utmost largeness of allowance for the difficulty of deciding in special cases, it must remain true that the highest lot is to have definite beliefs about which you feel that ‘necessity is laid upon you’ to declare them, as something better which you are bound to try and give to those who have the worse (iii. 215-217).

These volumes contain many passages in the same sense—­as, of course, her books contain them too.  She was a constant reader of the Bible, and the Imitatio was never far from her hand.  ’She particularly enjoyed reading aloud some of the finest chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. Paul’s Epistles.  The Bible and our elder English poets best suited the organ-like tones of her voice, which required for their full effect a certain solemnity and majesty of rhythm.’  She once expressed to a younger friend, who shared her opinions, her sense of the loss which they had in being unable to practise the old ordinances of family prayer.  ‘I hope,’ she says, ’we are well out of that phase in which the most philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey of human folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be one who could sympathise with no age but the age to come’ (ii. 308).

For this wise reaction she was no doubt partially indebted, as so many others have been, to the teaching of Comte.  Unquestionably the fundamental ideas had come into her mind at a much earlier period, when, for example, she was reading Mr. R.W.  Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect (1850, i. 253).  But it was Comte who enabled her to systematise these ideas, and to give them that ‘definiteness,’ which, as these pages show in a hundred places, was the quality that she sought before all others alike in men and their thoughts.  She always remained at a respectful distance from complete adherence to Comte’s scheme, but she was never tired of protesting that he was a really great thinker, that his famous survey of the Middle Ages in the fifth volume of the Positive Philosophy was full of luminous ideas, and that she had thankfully learned much from it.  Wordsworth, again, was dear to her in no small degree on the strength of such passages as that from the Prelude, which is the motto of one of the last chapters of her last novel:—­

The human nature with which I felt That I belonged and reverenced with love, Was not a persistent presence, but a spirit Diffused through time and space, with aid derived Of evidence from monuments, erect, Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest In earth, the widely scattered wreck sublime Of vanished nations.

Or this again, also from the Prelude (see iii. 389):—­