In a letter to her friend and publisher, the late Mr John Blackwood,
received soon after the appearance of the first edition, she writes, with
reference to certain passages: "They seemed to me more penetrating and
finely felt than almost anything I have read in the way of printed
comments on my own writings." Again, in a letter to a friend of the
author, she says: "When I read the volume in the summer, I felt as if I
had been deprived of something that should have fallen to my share in
never having made his personal acquaintance. And it would have been a
great benefit,--a great stimulus to me to have known some years earlier
that my work was being sanctioned by the sympathy of a mind endowed with
so much insight and delicate sensibility. It is difficult for me to
speak of what others may regard as an excessive estimate of my own work,
but I will venture to mention the keen perception shown in the note on
page 29, as something that gave me peculiar satisfaction."

Once more. In an article in the 'Contemporary Review' of last month, on
"The Moral Influence of George Eliot," by "One who knew her," the writer
says: "It happens that the only criticism which we have heard mentioned
as giving her pleasure, was a little posthumous volume published by
Messrs Blackwood."

With such testimony in its favour, it is hoped a third edition will not
be thought uncalled for.

_March_ 1881.

THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS.

"There is in man a higher than love of happiness: he can do without
happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness."

Such may be regarded as the fundamental lesson which one of the great
teachers of our time has been labouring to impress upon the age. The
truth, and the practical corollary from it, are not now first enunciated.
Representing, as we believe it to do, the practical aspect of the noblest
reality in man--that which most directly represents Him in whose image he
is made--it has found doctrinal expression more or less perfect from the
earliest times. The older Theosophies and Philosophies--Gymnosophist and
Cynic, Chaldaic and Pythagorean, Epicurean and Stoic, Platonist and
Eclectic--were all attempts to embody it in teaching, and to carry it out
in life. They saw, indeed, but imperfectly, and their expressions of the
truth are all one-sided and inadequate. But they did see, in direct
antagonism alike to the popular view and to the natural instinct of the
animal man, that what is