ence of mind and soul
if we cannot picture it clearly and certainly for ourselves. Love that
never falters, patience that never questions, meekness that never fails,
truth clear and still as the light of heaven, devotedness that knows no
thought of self, a life flowing calmly on through whatever of sorrow and
disappointment may remain toward the perfect purity and blessedness of
heaven. Few, we think, can carefully study the character and development
of Romola del Bardo and refuse to endorse the verdict that Imagination
has given us no figure more rounded and complete in every grace and glory
of feminine loveliness.

The sensational fiction of the day has laboured hard in the production of
great criminals; but it has produced no human being so vitally debased,
no nature so utterly loathsome, no soul so hopelessly lost, as the
handsome, smiling, accomplished, popular, viceless Greek, Tito Melema.
Yet is he the very reverse of what is called a monster of iniquity. That
which gives its deep and awful power to the picture is its simple,
unstrained, unvarnished truthfulness. He knows little of himself who
does not recognise as existent within himself, and as always battling for
supremacy there, that principle of evil which, accepted by Tito as his
life-law, and therefore consummating itself in him, "bringeth forth
death;" death the most utter and, so far as it is possible to see, the
most hopeless that can engulf the human soul.

The conception of Tito as one great central figure in a work of art would
scarcely, we think, have occurred to any one whose moral aim was other
than that which it is the endeavour of these remarks to trace out in
George Eliot's works. The working out of that conception, as it is here
worked out, would, we believe, have been impossible to any one who had
less strongly realised wherein all the true nobleness and all the true
debasement of humanity lie.

Outwardly, on his first appearance, there is not merely nothing repellent
about Tito; in person and manner, in genial kindly temper, in those very
forms of intelligence and accomplishment that specially suit the city and
the time, there is superficially everything to conciliate and attract. It
is almost impossible to define the subtle threads of indication through
which, from the first, we are forced to distrust him. Superficially, it
might seem at this time as if with Tito the probabilities were equal as
regards good and evil; and that with