something chemical about such an analysis as this of Rosamond:
"Every nerve and muscle was adjusted to the consciousness that she was
being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into
her physique. She even acted her own character, and so well that she did
not know it to be precisely her own!" Nor is the exactness of this any
less cruel: "We may handle extreme opinions with impunity, while our
furniture and our dinner-giving link us to the established order." Why
not own that "the emptiness of all things is never so striking to us as
when we fail in them?" Is it not better to avoid "following great
reformers beyond the threshold of their own homes?" Does not "our moral
sense learn the manners of good society?"

The lancet works impartially, because the hand that holds it is the hand
of a conscientious artist. She will endure the severest test you can
apply to an artist in fiction. She does not betray any religious bias in
her novels, which is all the more remarkable now that we find it in these
essays. Nor is it at all remarkable that this bias is so very easily
discovered in the novels by those who have found it in her essays!
Whatever opinions she may have expressed in her critical reviews, she is
not the Evangelical, or the Puritan, or the Jew, or the Methodist, or the
Dissenting Minister, or the Churchman, any more than she is the Radical,
the Liberal, or the Tory, who talks in the pages of her fiction.

Every side has its say, every prejudice its voice, and every prejudice
and side and vagary even has the philosophical reason given for it, and
the charitable explanation applied to it. She analyzes the religious
motives without obtrusive criticism or acrid cynicism or nauseous
cant--whether of the orthodox or heretical form.

The art of fiction has nothing more elevated, or more touching, or fairer
to every variety of religious experience, than the delineation of the
motives that actuated Dinah Morris the Methodist preacher, Deronda the
Jew, Dorothea the Puritan, Adam and Seth Bede, and Janet Dempster.

Who can object to this? "Religious ideas have the fate of melodies,
which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of
instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until
people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable."
Is it not one of the "mixed results of revivals" that "some gain a
religious vocabulary rather than a r