manous animal, in a white neck cloth, with | shackled and overpowered the life of his views more c. less Anglican, and fur-imagination. It would not be true to say

tively addicted to the flute." These sar- that George Eliot failed in like fashion casms are not good in themselves, and with Savonarola. No doubt her picture still less are they good in their connec- of the great Italian reformer is fine, and tion, where they spoil a most catholic- up to a certain point effective. But in minded and marvellous picture. George looking back on the story, Savonarola Eliot's literary judgment was not equal to fades away from the scene. It is Bardo, her reason and her imagination, and she the old enthusiast for the Greek learning, took a great deal too much pains with the or the fitfully vindictive gleam of Baldasdiscursive parts of her books. sarre's ebbing intellect as flashes of his old power return to him, or the supple Greek's crafty ambition, which stands out in one's memory, while the devout and passionate Dominican is all but forgotten.

Imaginatively, we hardly recognize any defect in this great painter, except that there is too little movement in her stories; they wholly want dash, and sometimes want even a steady current. No novelist, however, in the whole series of No one can deny that the moral tone English novelists, has combined so much of George Eliot's books - "Felix Holt " power of painting external life on a being, perhaps, a doubtful exception - is broad canvas with so wonderful an in- of the noblest and purest kind, nor that sight into the life of the soul. Her En- the tone of feeling which prevails in them glish butchers, farriers, auctioneers, and goes far in advance even of their direct parish clerks, are at least as vigorously moral teaching. We should say, for indrawn as Sir Walter Scott's bailies, peas- stance, that in regard to marriage, the ants, serving-men, and beggars; while her spirit of George Eliot's books conveys an pictures of the inward conflicts, whether almost sacramental conception of its bindof strong or of feeble natures, are far ing sacredness, though, unfortunately, of more powerful than any which Sir Walter course, her career did much to weaken Scott ever attempted. Such a contrast as the authority of the teaching implied in that between Hetty and Dinah, such a her books. But the total effect of her picture as that of Mr. Casaubon's mental books is altogether ennobling, though the and moral limitation and confusion, such profoundly sceptical reflections with which a study as that of Gwendolen's moral they are penetrated may counteract, to suffering under the torture administered some extent, the tonic effect of the high by Grandcourt, was as much beyond the moral feeling with which they are colored. sphere of Sir Walter Scott, as his histori- Before or after most of the noblest scenes, cal pictures of Louis XI., Mary Stuart, we come to thoughts in which it is almost Balfour of Burley, Claverhouse, or James as impossible for the feelings delineated I. are beyond the sphere of George Eliot. to live any intense or hopeful life, as it is On the only occasion on which George for human lungs to breathe in the vacuum Eliot attempted anything of the nature of of an air-pump. After she has breathed historical portraiture, —in “Romola,” a noble spirit into a great scene, she too the purely imaginative part of the story is often proceeds to exhaust the air which far more powerful than the historical. is the very life-breath of great actions, so The ideas of the time when the revival that the reflective element in her books of learning took place had quite pos- undermines the ground beneath the feet sessed themselves of George Eliot's mind, of her noblest characters. In "Adam and had stirred her into a wonderful Bede," she eventually justifies her hero's imaginative effort. But her conceptions secularistic coldness of nature, and makes of the purely imagined figures, of you feel that Dinah was an enthusiast, Bardo, of Baldassarre, and of Tito, are far greater than her study of Savonarola. The genius for historical portraiture, for gathering up into a single focus the hints of chroniclers and historians, is something distinct from that of mere creation, and demands apparently a subtler mixture of interpreting with creating power, than most great creators possess. Even Sir Walter Scott failed with Napoleon, where he had not free movement enough, and the wealth of historical material

who could not justify what she taught. In "Janet's Repentance," again, she expresses in a few sentences the relief with which the mind turns away from the search for convictions calculated to urge the mind to a life of beneficent self-sacrifice, to those acts of self-sacrifice themselves:

No wonder the sick-room and the lazaretto have so often been a refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt, -a place of repose for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty

about which all creeds and all philosophies to Sir Walter Scott, and second to him are at one: here, at least, the conscience will only because her imagination, though it not be dogged by doubt, the benign impulse penetrates far deeper, had neither the will not be checked by adverse theory; here same splendid vigor of movement, nor the you may begin to act, without settling one pre- same bright serenity of tone. Her stories liminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the long night-watches, are, on the whole, richer than Fielding's, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the help as well as far nobler, and vastly less artiless limbs, to divine the want that can find no ficial than Richardson's. They cover so utterance beyond the feeble motion of the much larger a breadth and deeper a depth hand, or beseeching glance of the eye, - these of life than Miss Austen's, that though are offices that demand no self-questionings, they are not perhaps so exquisitely finno casuistry, no assent to propositions, no ished, they belong to an altogether higher weighing of consequences. Within the four kind of world. They are stronger, freer, walls where the stir and glare of the world are and less Rembrandt-like than Miss shut out, and every voice is subdued, where a Brontë's; and are not mere photographs human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow, the moral relation of social man, like Trollope's. They are of man to man is reduced to its utmost clear-patient and powerful studies of individual ness and simplicity; bigotry cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it. As we bend over the sick-bed, all the forces of our nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience, and of love, and sweep down the miserable, choking drift of our quarrels, our debates, our would-be wisdom, and our clam

orous, selfish desires. This blessing of serene

freedom from the importunities of opinion lies in all simple, direct acts of mercy, and is one source of that sweet calm which is often felt by the watcher in the sick-room, even when the duties there are of a hard and terrible kind.

There speaks the true George Eliot, and we may clearly say of her that in fiction it is her great aim, while illustrating what she believes to be the true facts and laws of human life, to find a fit stage for ideal feelings nobler than any which seem to her to be legitimately bred by those facts and laws. But she too often finds herself compelled to injure her own finest moral effects by the sceptical atmosphere with which she permeates them. She makes the high-hearted heroine of her "Mill on the Floss" all but yield to the physiological attraction of a poor sort of man of science. She makes the enthusiastic Dorothea, in "Middlemarch," decline upon a poor creature like Ladishaw, who has earned her regard chiefly by being the object of Mr. Casaubon's jealousy. She takes religious patriotism for the subject of her last great novel, but is at some pains to show that her hero may be religious without any belief in God, and patriotic without any but an ideal country. This reflective vacuum which she pumps out behind all noble action, gives to the workings of her great imagination a general effect of supreme melancholy.

We should rank George Eliot second only in her own proper field - which is not the field of satire, Thackeray's field –

human beings, in an appropriate setting of social manners, from that of the dumbest provincial life, to that of life of the highest self-knowledge. And yet the reflections by which they are pervaded, subtle and often wise as they are, to some extent injure the art of the pictures by their satiric tone, or if they do not do that, take superfluous pains to warn you how very doubtful and insecure is the spiritual footing on which the highest excellence plants its tread.

And this, too, is still more the fault of her poems, which, in spite of an almost Miltonic stateliness, reflect too much the monotonous cadences of her own musical but over regulated voice. The poems want inspiration. And the speculative melancholy, which only slightly injured her prose, predominates fatally in her verse. Throughout her poems she is always plumbing the deep waters for an anchorage, and reporting "no soundings." The finest of her poems, "The Legend of Jubal,” tries to affirm, indeed, that death, the loss of all conscious existence, is a sort of moral gain, - as though the loss of self were the loss of selfishness, which it not only is not, but never could be, since selfishness can only be morally extinguished in a living self, but the lesson is so obviously a moral gloss put on the face of a bad business, that there, at least, no anchorage is found. And in "The Spanish Gypsy "the speculative despair is even worse, while the failure of the imaginative portraiture is more conspicuous, because the portraiture itself is more ambitious. It will be by her seven or eight great fictions that George Eliot will live, not by her poems, and still less by her essays. But all these, one perhaps excepted, will long continue to be counted the greatest achievements of an Englishwoman's, and perhaps even of any woman's brain.

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From Blackwood's Magazine.
BENVENUTO CELLINI.

"ALL men of every class, who have done something creditable, ought, being trustworthy and honest men, to write their lives with their own hand," says the great artist and extraordinary personage whose name stands at the head of this page. No words more fit could be found with which to begin the discussion of a class of books which, if not altogether so valuable as Ser Benvenuto considers them, have supplied many excellent and more amusing pages to general history. If his advice had been largely followed, it would scarcely be hyperbole to say that the world would not contain the volumes that might have been written - so that we may conclude ourselves fortunate that the impulse only comes to one now and then; yet we have no doubt it comes to a great many who never get the length of autobiography. When old age arrives gently and pleasantly, when the man who has lived an active and important life finds himself, without much pain, and with many consolations of comfort, and honor, and observance, put aside from it, and left with a long and wealthy past behind him, and a somewhat impoverished present thinly filling its place, it is a very natural impulse which bids him find amusement and companionship for his old age in making the great public his confidant, and telling his own story to the vague crowds whom he will never see, but in whom imagination represents to him many an unknown friend and sympathetic soul. Whatever there may be of humiliation in the sense that he has found himself, or, still worse, that others have found him, no longer fit for the charge he has so long held, is softened by the consciousness that he can leave behind a record of many things worth knowing, clear up, perhaps, some historical mysteries of his period, and keep the incidents of his own life alive among men. An old statesman in his dignified retirement, an old priest in the quiet of his parsonage or his cell, an old author whose inventions are over, and who finds his experiences more interesting to himself than any effort of romance- the spectator feels that nothing

could be more appropriate than this occupation of the halcyon years which every laboring man seems to have a right to before the end. We follow the calm days of their retired leisure with a pleasant sense of fitness. It is seemly and natural that they should discourse to us seated in the easy-chair of old age, which is a natural throne and pulpit; and the old man's narrative of his youth has a tender interest, a suppressed and gentle pathos, which goes to our hearts. But it is only a few who have this blessed and beautiful old age. The majority of men carry their cares with them to the very brink of the grave, and only get rid of their burden. when the shoulders fail under it: indeed the majority of men do not live to old age at all, and so have neither the means nor its seclusion and calm. Sometimes the opportunity of giving us the benefit of the will and all surrounding circumstances being in favor of the intended revelation

it is postponed too long, till the hand falls powerless and the memory is insufficient to the task. Sometimes just enough is accomplished to make us feel the excellence of the method, when the pen drops from the feeble fingers, and has to be taken up by somebody who knows the subject only as others know it, from outside, seeing the mountains like molehills, and upsetting the perspective of events. But yet we have a sufficiently large list of completed and finished efforts to show their value; and it is an instructive and somewhat sad pleasure for the student of human nature to watch those shadows as they appear before him, each anxious to give the best account of itself, some in serene human unconsciousness thrusting their own little tale of events between him and the history of the world, finding their infant or their apple-tree of more importance than the convulsions of nations. Still even an apple-tree, the wonderful crop upon which so excites its owner as to confuse his apprehension of the importance of the greatest public event, is of use in its way as revealing that undercur rent of peaceable life which streams serenely on, whatever storms may convulse the air, and which is the real secret of national continuance. So long as that