be the separation of all the world calls success or reward from the
life that is thus seeking its highest fulfilment. In conformity with the
average doctrine of "compensation," Amos Barton should have appeared
before us at last installed in a comfortable living, much respected by
his flock, and on good terms with his brethren and well-to-do neighbours
around. With a truer and deeper wisdom, the author places him before us
in that brief after-glimpse still a poor, care-worn, bowed-down man, and
the sweet daughter-face by his side shows the premature lines of anxiety
and sorrow. Love, anguish, and death, working their true fruits within,
bring no success or achievement that the eye can note. By all the
principles of "poetic justice," Mr Tryan ought to have recovered and
married Janet; under the influence of her larger nature to have shaken
off his narrownesses; to have lived down all contempt and opposition, and
become the respected influential incumbent of the town; and in due time
to have toned down from his "enthusiasm of humanity" into the simply
earnest, hard-working, and rather commonplace town rector. Better,
because truer, as it is. Only in the earlier dawn of this higher life of
the soul, either in the race or in the individual man; only in the days
of the Isaacs and Jacobs of our young humanity, though not with the
Abrahams, the Moses', or the Joshuas even then; only when the soul first
begins to apprehend that its true relation to God is to be realised only
through the Cross--is there conscience and habitual "respect unto the
recompense" of _any_ reward.

In 'Adam Bede,' the first of George Eliot's more elaborate works, the
illustrations of the great moral purpose we have assigned to her are so
numerous and varied, that it is not easy to select from among them. On
the one hand, Dinah Morris--one of the most exquisitely serene and
beautiful creations of fiction--and Seth and Adam Bede present to us,
variously modified, the aspect of that life which is aiming toward the
highest good. On the other hand, Arthur Donnithorne and Hetty
Sorrel--poor little vain and shallow-hearted Hetty--bring before us the
meanness, the debasement, and, if unarrested, the spiritual and
remediless death inevitably associated with and accruing from that "self-
pleasing" which, under one form or other, is the essence of all evil and
sin. Of these, Arthur Donnithorne and Adam Bede seem to us the two who
are most sharply and subtil