of humanity. For reward, he must derive what satisfaction he can from the sense that his efforts in this direction have not been unavailing. So pure and disinterested is this faith, so sublimated from all motives other than the highest, that, judged by it, the desire to do right from the hope of attaining heaven or avoiding hell is mere selfishness. Such a religion is evidently suited only to saints and Positivists. It appeals to nothing which actuates the multitude. It demands a sacrifice of self which only a few recorded characters have been found capable of. It requires us to put all we possess into a sinking fund for the benefit of nobody knows whom. It wants the powerful element of hope, for its promises are limited to the hazy expectation of an indefinitely distant possibility, less than the shadow of a shade. George Eliot, with a view to adapting the doctrine to common use, would confine the endeavours of ordinary natures to the task of furthering the happiness and advantage of those immediately around them. But we think the youth of this country have long been familiar with so much Positivism as that, in the Church Catechism. In common with the Positivists she had, we learn, "great hope for the future in the improvement of human nature by the gradual development of the affections and the sympathetic emotions," – though what she found in the past to give reason for such expectation, we do not learn. The high and exclusive devotion to humanity on which the religion is based can only be a rule of life to a few who, in its absence, would have conformed to its precepts. As a means for effecting the ambitious design of influencing and modifying the race, its demands on human nature are impossible to be satisfied, its allurements cold and dim: it might have been conceived in the moon, and for the inhabitants of the moon; it is such stuff as dreams are made of.
Now that this famous woman has quitted the scene, the world would gladly know somewhat of her life as apart from her works. These three volumes contain her biography, chiefly as recorded by herself in journals and letters to intimate friends, the links being supplied sparingly and judiciously by Mr Cross, whose one thought in the matter has evidently been how best to let her speak for herself. "In authorship," she says, "I hold carelessness to be a mortal sin;" and this rule she extended no less stringently to her correspondence. The plan on which the letters and journals have been sifted, and formed into what closely resembles an autobiography, is novel, and says much for the originality and skill of the biographer. In these records the reader will follow her steps in life from childhood, will learn, what were the influences that moulded her character, the history of her literary career and of her domestic life, the impressions derived from foreign travel, what she thought of eminent contemporaries, and what manner of people were her chosen friends. He will enjoy, for the most part, the immense advantage of finding all these interesting matters chronicled by herself; and such additions as Mr Cross has made, while indispensable to completeness, are as valuable as they are unobtrusive. The many devoted students of her works will receive a new pleasure in reading them again along with the present biography, which sheds on them quite an illumination, and
