at you contemplate as permanent. To teach the young
personally has always seemed to me the most satisfactory supplement to
teaching the world through books, and I have often wished that I had such a
means of having fresh, living, spiritual children within sight.

One can hardly turn one's thought toward Eastern Europe just now without a
mingling of pain and dread; but we mass together distant scenes and events
in an unreal way, and one would like to believe that the present troubles
will not at any time press on you in Hungary with more external misfortune
than on us in England.

Mr. Lewes is happily occupied in his psychological studies. We both look,
forward to the reception of the work you kindly promised us, and he begs me
to offer you his best regards.

Believe me, my dear sir,
Yours with much esteem,
M.E. LEWES.

It was a part of George Eliot's purpose in _Daniel Deronda_ to criticise
the social life of England in the spirit in which she had criticised it in
_Middlemarch_, as being deficient in spiritual power, moral purpose and
noble sentiment. If she made it clear in _Middlemarch_ that the individual
is crippled and betrayed by society, it was her purpose to make it quite as
clear in _Daniel Deronda_ how society may become the true inspirer of the
individual. We may quarrel with her theory of the origin and nature of the
spiritual life in man, but she has somewhat truly conceived its vast
importance and shown the character of that influence it everywhere has over
man's life. As types of spiritual lifts, and as individual conceptions of
human character, the personages of this novel are drawn with marvellous
skill. Mr. E.P. Whipple says that Daniel Deronda is "one of the noblest
and most original characters among the heroes imagined by poets, dramatists
and novelists." With equal or even greater justice can it be said that
Gwendolen Harleth is one of the most powerful and grandly conceived of
imaginary creations in all literature. In the characters, the situations,
and the whole working out of this novel, George Eliot shows herself one of
the great masters of literary creation.

When the prejudices aroused by the Jewish element in it are allayed, and
_Daniel Deronda_ is read as a work of literary genius, it will be found not
to be the least interesting and important of George Eliot's books. It has
the religious interest and inspiration of _Adam Bede_, the historic value
of _Romola_, and the critical elements