little the Immortals regard our worldly honors? And Doctor Casaubon too, only rather less offensive because rather more contemptible-who does not know him? Type of a class who have learned much, know little, and can do naught. Dunces dense with the dust of accumulated centuries of trivial learning; collegiate Chinese who have painfully struck their twelve o'clock in some high sounding degree and then run downmummies of embalmed and buried pedantry owlishly plodding about in live men's way. Both, as we regret to know, only too evidently and painfully true to nature. But the Grandcourts are easily avoided by a modest man--whose ordinary path will only touch theirs at an occasional annual meeting, and the cases in which infatuated beauty binds itself to the ponderous emptiness of a Casaubon, are surely very rare. In Middlemarch or in Daniel Deronda it is not so. These people fill a front rank amongst the personages of the drama, they mould the plot, they cannot be ignored, you recognise their features as only too skilfully depicted, you have to accept them as stubborn facts. The one actually marries, and mars, the sweetest, or at least the most loveable of all the author's female characters, and the other has irritated you through two good volumes before Providence suddenly loses patience and pushes him aside. To produce the effect which is attained in this and in many similar cases is indeed art of a high order, but it is art which has found so effectual a way celare artem that the witchery of the artist cannot but have suffered diminution from the undisguised realism of the picture. The other noteworthy phase of the utter truthfulness of George Eliot's system, is to be found in the calm impartiality with which it leads her to reproduce the failings of the good, and the blemishes of the beautiful. Here again, it is needless to instance examples; the fact of the partial unsatisfactoriness of very many of the author's brightest characters being generally admitted. Few students of Adam Bede can have escaped a passing feeling of contempt for Seth's helplessness, or of anger at Adam's priggishness; and all the other novels will furnish similar examples, the natural and intentional results indeed of the system upon which the novels are constructed. For no one will for a moment deny the exceeding truthfulness of these mirror-like representations of faulty humanity. The scantiest experience, and the feeblest intelligence, will teach us to expect this imperfection and shortcoming always and everywhere. It is much to find man or woman solely influenced in theory, by a pure and an unselfish motive;— even these are worthy of truest love, and more than this, only the infatuation of affection can expect or discover. But, because this is so in life, should it be so in literature? This is at least a moot point. is a question of art, and of its power, of which we may perhaps be best able to judge, by the analogies of art in a kindred, but more circumscribed form. Thus, the most conscientious of landscape painters would altogether decline certain of the accidents of the scene he saw before him. The bold self-assertions of a commercial spirit; the open disregard of all æsthetic principles in the choice of colors; rawness here and dirt there; the fripperies and vulgarities and fooleries of life; all It these he would tone down, transform, or eschew. And if you asked him why, he would tell you that Nature and he did not start quite upon a level, and that there were certain attendant circumstances in real life which could cover a multitude of blemishes, but which art could not transfer to her canvases. Give me, he would say, the change, the motion, the wavering of the shadows, the clear trill of the birds, the sweep of the clouds; the light, the air, in fine the life;-and then indeed I can paint honestly. But until I have these at command, I must pick and choose and arrange; and even so, my best work will but half tell the first truth about Nature;-that she is beautiful. Surely it is precisely so with any picture of man. Even the best must be the merest of sketches, compared with the original; how can such a sketch convey any meaning at all, unless it is allowable to us to exaggerate somewhat that which is significant, and to throw that which does not concern our purpose some little into shadow. Can we give you in print the quaint curl of the lip which hints that this man's surly speech is, after all, a kindly meaning grown atwist; or set you down on paper the innumerable hard grinds against rough circumstances which, rightly judged, wonld prove yonder man's curtness a higher polish by far than our suave commonplaces? Certainly not. But if not, then what is the use of our attempting to convey any meaning at all, unless our blundering penmanship may be permitted to use what devices occur to it to make its message clear. A man in life is a whole and solid fact; you may turn him round, or at least turn yourself round him, and see both sides in all the clear light of detail. A man in a picture, painted or printed, is of necessity, one-sided; no conceivable skill could ever make both sides. equally clear; unless then it is a matter of indifference to us what impression we convey, we must choose the light and the position. And this brings us really to the heart of the whole matter; to the central point, on our judgment of which all true criticism of George Eliot must depend. Of her superb and almost unexampled power of delineation, of her singular acuteness of insight, of her unfailing command of a pure and fluent style; it needs little care to remind us, we are all agreed so far. There is another question behind all this; a question which cannot be solved so easily, and to which only very great wisdom, or very great foolishness, will give a prompt reply. What is the lesson which all this wealth of power and of beauty is intended to convey? Or are we quite sure that there is any lesson beneath it at all? George Eliot's novels are frequently spoken of as "philosophical" novels, and the complaint has even been made against her later productions, that the philosophy in them has somewhat overweighted the fiction, and that they suffer, if not from too much thoughtfulness, at least from too much expression of thought. The first impression they convey is manifestly that of profound thought, and the striking exactitude of their depictions of life leads very naturally to a train of philosophical thought, which may or may not be fairly inferential to the author's own meaning. But any number of unconnected reflections, however acute or wise, will be far from forming a system of philosophy, in the sense of an explanation of, or a rule of, life. We must still ask the question whether, apart from the surmises which we may ourselves found on this or that incident, the general tenor of George Eliot's novels conveys any real teaching that may help humanity-any light for those to whom the present is wearisome because the future is so dark. It is a question which one would not presume dogmatically to answer, but if there be a system of philosophy permeating and inspiring the whole, one would at least be glad to know what it is. This point the exuberant mass of literature which has already clustered about the great name, seems to have done little towards solving, although the air of hopelessness in much of George Eliot's work has been very generally noticed. One can scarcely conceive that a great artist with an object in view, would have adopted a method which presents all that tells for, and all that tells against, that object, with scornful impartiality. Are not the appearances rather those of a clear and cold intelligence, recording all that it sees, with a calm fidelity as far removed from sympathy as from prejudice? And will such a clear, but cold intelligence be of much help to our poor bewildered fancies-hoping this, fearing that, yearning for we know not what-and most consistently and persistently dissatisfied? It is to be feared not. George Eliot seems, indeed too probably, to have regarded life with that absence of sympathy which would naturally follow upon absence of faith. Others hide, and slur over, and dream, and come to believe their dreams; because they are all along haunted by the conviction that man was made in the image of God, and that sooner or later the mean shell of earthly pettiness must fall off and the likeness be made manifest. George Eliot's attitude is that of one who neither believes nor disbelieves, but simply not knowing, declines utterly to conjecture. To such a frame of mind all subjects of artistic manipulation will be almost equally acceptable; and the vexatiously commonplace, and the irritatingly incomplete, will have their fair share of attention just as all the rest. Do you argue that there is so much of this commonplace and incomplete in the world, that it is in vain to attempt to urge any really lofty ideal of life, unless they be more or less ignored? What is that to the painter who aims at no such ideal? Life as it is, must perforce satisfy one who absolutely refuses to form any conjecture of life as it may be. But, however kindly, wisely, or even tenderly, life as it is may be painted, there must come a point where the cord of sympathy between the master and the student will snap,-if that be all. So long as we are creatures full of vague and shadowy hopes and fears; the exactest guide to the known and present, will be but a halfway guide to us. To treat these hopes and fears as unreal, may be a proof of superior intelligence, but it is of little service to us, who only know that we live in them. The pitch of the human orchestra may be lamentably low, but such as it is, the notes of a very angel who might. wish to aid the harmony, must be attuned to it, or make mere discord. If there be any justice in these views of the works of a great and acknowledged genius, then there is no consideration which should restrain us from holding and expressing them. We may rest assured that true fame will never be reared upon a false foundation, and there is more real appreciation, not to speak of justice, in respecting that which is clear to us, than in giving credit for all manner of virtues which are not. If, in fact, George Eliot can give us life, but no rule of life; the truth, but no sympathies beyond what is the present truth, then it is better for us that we should know it, and far kinder to her reputation that she should be prized for what she has given, than appealed to for what she cannot give. ACHESPÉ A REVERIE. When the flashing moonbeams play And the wavelets through the night Fancy revels unconfined, Feeling both in sky and sea To the vagrant breeze's sigh. No other sound disturbs the peaceful night, As contemplation takes her blissful flight. C. E. G. AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CRUSOE. It would, we think, be exceedingly difficult to find the boy or man who has not at some time or other read Daniel Defoe's immortal tale, and perused with interest the story of fascinating, if incredible, adventures known as the "History of the Swiss Family Robinson." Stories of shipwreck, especially when accompanied by desert island adventures, are always eagerly devoured by boys, and it is a matter of intense surprise to us that a book like Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative of his Shipwreck should not be as widely known and as eagerly sought after by juveniles and adults as "Robinson Crusoe," the "Arabian Nights' Entertainment,” or any of the standard works in the language. It is possible the book may be more widely read and more generally known than we are taking for granted, but, judging from enquiries made for the purpose among a fairly numerous circle of friends and acquaintances of literary tastes, the existence even of such a work is scarcely known, and it is a rare thing, indeed, to find anyone at all fully acquainted with its contents. The full title of this remarkable book is "Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative of his Shipwreck and Discovery of Certain Islands in the Caribbean Sea, with a Detail of many Extraordinary and Highly Interesting Events in his Life, from the year 1733 to 1749." It is edited by Miss Jane Porter, whose "Scottish Chiefs" and "Thaddeus of Warsaw" are better known by far than "Seaward's Narrative," and a new edition was published by Mr. Nimmo so recently as 1878. Miss Porter does not appear, from the internal evidence of the book, to have had a very difficult task, beyond, perhaps, arranging and revising the written MS., and seeing it safely through the press, for the work is written in clear and forcible English, partly in the form of a diary and partly in that of an auto-biography. There is no attempt at fine writing at any time, the extraordinary occurrences being fully narrated, but not in any way embellished by fanciful setting. Edward Seaward was the son of a small farmer in Gloucestershire, and after leaving school he for two years assisted his father on the farm, afterwards joining a paternal uncle at Bristol, in whose counting-house he remained until his mother's death, when he re-joined his father. Very soon afterwards, however, he resumed commercial pursuits, going out to Virginia as supercargo for his uncle. His voyage was a complete success, and his employer was delighted, both with the pecuniary result to himself and the knowledge that his nephew was well endowed with excellent business qualities. The elation of the latter was, however, |