mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing newspaper critics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect for the French people and the Provisional Government.  Lamartine can act a poem if he cannot write one of the very first order.  I hope that beautiful face given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his:  it is worthy of an aureole.  I have little patience with people who can find time to pity Louis Philippe and his moustachioed sons.  Certainly our decayed monarchs should be pensioned off:  we should have an hospital for them, or a sort of zoological garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be preserved.  It is but justice that we should keep them, since we have spoiled them for any honest trade.  Let them sit on soft cushions, and have their dinner regularly, but, for heaven’s sake, preserve me from sentimentalising over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions of unfed souls and bodies.  Surely he is not so Ahab-like as to wish that the revolution had been deferred till his son’s days:  and I think the shades of the Stuarts would have some reason to complain if the Bourbons, who are so little better than they, had been allowed to reign much longer.’

The hopes of ’48 were not very accurately fulfilled, and in George Eliot they never came to life again.  Yet in social things we may be sure that undying hope is the secret of vision.

There is a passage in Coleridge’s Friend which seems to represent the outcome of George Eliot’s teaching on most, and not the worst, of her readers:—­’The tangle of delusions,’ says Coleridge, ’which stifled and distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a salutary violence.  To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the gradual improvement, the cautious and unhazardous labours of the industrious though contented gardener—­to prune, to strengthen, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and the caterpillar.’  Coleridge goes farther than George Eliot, when he adds the exhortation—­’Far be it from us to undervalue with light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence to which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext.’

George Eliot disliked vehemence more and more as her work advanced.  The word ‘crudity,’ so frequently on her lips, stood for all that was objectionable and distasteful.  The conservatism of an artistic moral nature was shocked by the seeming peril to which priceless moral elements of human character were exposed by the energumens of progress.  Their impatient hopes for the present appeared to her rather unscientific; their disregard of the past very irreverent and impious.  Mill had the same feeling when he disgusted his father by standing up for Wordsworth, on the ground that Wordsworth was helping to keep alive