alambique, in spite of tiresome double and treble distillations of phraseology, in spite of fatiguing moralities, gravities, and ponderosities, we have still been in communion with a high and commanding intellect and a great nature.  We are vexed by pedantries that recall the precieuses of the Hotel Rambouillet, but we know that she had the soul of the most heroic women in history.  We crave more of the Olympian serenity that makes action natural and repose refreshing, but we cannot miss the edification of a life marked by indefatigable labour after generous purposes, by an unsparing struggle for duty, and by steadfast and devout fellowship with lofty thoughts.

Those who know Mr. Myers’s essay on George Eliot will not have forgotten its most imposing passage:—­

I remember how at Cambridge, I waited with her once in the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men,—­the words God, Immortality, Duty,—­pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.  Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law.  I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl’s in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates.

To many, the relation which was the most important event in George Eliot’s life will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduce all talk of duty to a mockery.  It is inevitable that this should be so, and those who disregard a social law have little right to complain.  Men and women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to call bad, have taken this particular law into their own hands before now, and committed themselves to conduct of which ’magnanimity owes no account to prudence.’  But if they had sense and knew what they were about, they have braced themselves to endure the disapproval of a majority fortunately more prudential than themselves.  The world is busy, and its instruments are clumsy.  It cannot know all the facts; it has neither time nor material for unravelling all the complexities of motive, or for distinguishing mere libertinage from grave and deliberate moral misjudgment; it is protecting itself as much as it is condemning the offenders.  On all this, then, we need have neither sophistry nor cant.  But those who seek something deeper than a verdict for the honest working purpose of leaving cards and inviting to dinner, may feel, as has been observed by a contemporary writer, that men and women are more fairly judged, if judge them we must, by the way in which they bear the burden of an error