The fullness of George Eliot's mind at this time may be gathered from the rapidity with which one work followed another. A book from her pen had been appearing regularly each year. The Scenes from Clerical Life had appeared in book form in 1858, Adam Bede was printed in 1859, The Mill on the Floss came out in 1860, and now, in 1861, followed Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe. It is with the greatest reluctance that I find myself obliged to pass this book without comment. In some particulars Silas Marner is the most remarkable novel in our language. On the one hand, when I read the immortal scene at the Rainbow Inn where the village functionaries, the butcher, the farrier, the parish clerk and so on are discussing ghosts, bullocks and other matters over their evening ale, my mind runs to Dogberry and Verges and the air feels as if Shakspeare were sitting somewhere not far off. On the other hand, the downright ghastliness of the young Squire's punishment for stealing the long-hoarded gold of Silas Marner the weaver, always carries me straight to that pitiless Pardoner's Tale of Chaucer in which gold is so cunningly identified with death. I am sure you will pardon me if I spend a single moment in recalling the plots of these two stories so far as concerns this point of contact. In Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale three riotous young men of Flanders are drinking one day at a tavern. In the midst of their merriment they hear the clink of a bell before a dead body which is borne past the door on its way to burial. They learn that it is an old companion who is dead; all three become suddenly inflamed with mortal anger against Death; and they rush forth resolved to slay him wherever they may find him. Presently they meet an old man. "Why do you live so long?" they mockingly inquire of him. "Because," says he,

"Where is this Death of whom you have spoken?" furiously demand the three young men. The old man replied, "You will find him under an oak tree in yonder grove." The three rush forward; and upon arriving at the oak find three bags full of gold coin. Overjoyed at their good fortune they are afraid to carry the treasure into town by day lest they be suspected of robbery. They therefore resolve to wait until night and in the meantime to make merry. For the latter purpose one of the three goes to town after food and drink. As soon as he is out of hearing, the two who remain under the tree resolve to murder their companion on his return so that they may be the richer by his portion of the treasure; he, on the other hand, whilst buying his victual in town, shrewdly drops a great lump of poison into the bottle of drink he is to carry back so that his companions may perish and he take all.

To make a long story short, the whole plot is carried out. As soon as he who was sent to town returns, his companions fall upon him and murder him; they then proceed merrily to eat and drink what he has brought; the poison does its work; presently all three lie dead under the oak tree by the side of the gold, and the old man's direction has come true, and they have found death under that tree. In George Eliot's story the young English Squire also finds death in finding gold. You will all remember how Dunstan Cass in returning late at night from a fox-hunt on foot—for he had killed his horse in the chase—finds himself near the stone hut where Silas Marner the weaver has long plied his trade, and where he is known to have concealed a large sum in gold. The young man is extraordinarily pressed for money; he resolves to take Marner's gold; the night is dark and misty; he makes his way through the mud and darkness to the cottage and finds the door open, Marner being, by the rarest of accidents, away from the hut. The young man quickly discovers the spot in the floor where the weaver kept his gold; he seizes the two heavy leathern bags filled with guineas; and the chapter ends. "So he stepped forward into the darkness." All this occurs in Chapter IV. The story then proceeds; nothing more is heard of Dunstan Cass in the village for many years; the noise of the robbery has long ago died away; Silas Marner has one day found a golden head of hair lying on the very spot of his floor where he used to finger his own gold; the little outcast who had fallen asleep with her head in this position, after having wandered into Marner's cottage, has been brought up by him to womanhood; when one day, at a critical period in Silas Marner's existence, it happens that in draining some lower grounds the pit of an old stone quarry, which had for years stood filled with rain-water near his house, becomes dry, and on the bottom is revealed a skeleton with a leathern bag of gold in each hand. The young man plunging out into the dark, laden with his treasure, had fallen in and lain for all these years to be afterwards brought to light as another phase of the frequent identity between death and gold. Here, too, one is obliged to remember those doubly dreadful words in Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo having with difficulty bought poison from the apothecary, cries:

I must also instance one little passing picture in Silas Marner which though extremely fanciful, is yet, a charming type of some of the greatest and most characteristic work that George Eliot has done. Silas Marner had been a religious enthusiast of an obscure sect of a small manufacturing town of England; suddenly a false accusation of theft in which the circumstantial evidence was strong against him brings him into disgrace among his fellow-disciples. With his whole faith in God and man shattered he leaves his town, wanders over to the village of Raveloe, begins aimlessly to pursue his trade of weaving, presently is paid for some work in gold; in handling the coin he is smit with the fascination of its yellow radiance, and presently we find him pouring out all the prodigious intensity of his nature, which had previously found a fitter field in religion, in the miser's passion. Working day and night while yet a young man he fills his two leathern bags with gold; and George Eliot gives us some vivid pictures of how, when his day's work would be done, he would brighten up the fire in his stone hut which stood at the edge of the village, eagerly lift up the particular brick of the stone floor under which he kept his treasure concealed, pour out the bright yellow heaps of coin and run his long white fingers through them with all the miser's ecstasy. But after he is robbed the utter blank in his soul—and one can imagine such a blank in such a soul, for he was essentially religious—becomes strangely filled. One day a poor woman leading her little golden-haired child is making her way along the road past Marner's cottage; she is the wife, by private marriage, of the Squire's eldest son, and after having been cruelly treated by him for years has now desperately resolved to appear with her child at a great merry-making which goes on at the Squire's to-day, there to expose all and demand justice. It so happens however that in her troubles she has become an opium-taker; just as she is passing Marner's cottage the effect of an unusually large dose becomes overpowering; she lies down and falls off into a stupor which this time ends in death. Meantime the little golden-haired girl innocently totters into the open door of Marner's cottage during his absence; presently lies down, places her head with all its golden wealth upon the very brick which Marner used to lift up in order to bring his gold to light, and so falls asleep, while a ray of sunlight strikes through the window and illuminates the little one's head. Marner now returns; he is dazed at beholding what seems almost to be another pile of gold at the familiar spot on the floor. He takes this new treasure into his hungry heart and brings up the little girl who becomes a beautiful woman and faithful daughter to him. His whole character now changes and the hardness of his previous brutal misanthropy softens into something at least approaching humanity. Now, it is fairly characteristic of George Eliot that she constantly places before us lives which change in a manner of which this is typical: that is to say, she is constantly showing us intense and hungry spirits first wasting their intensity and hunger upon that which is unworthy, often from pure ignorance of anything worthier, then finding where love is worthy, and thereafter loving larger loves, and living larger lives.

Is not this substantially the experience of Janet Dempster, of Adam Bede, replacing the love of Hetty with that of Dinah Morris; of Romola, of Dorothea, of Gwendolen Harleth?

This last name brings us directly to the work which we were specially to study to-day. George Eliot's novels have all striking relationships among themselves which cause them to fall into various groups according to various points of view. There is one point however from which her entire work divides itself into two groups, of which one includes the whole body of her writings up to 1876: the other group consists solely of Daniel Deronda. This classification is based on the fact that all the works in the first group concern the life of a time which is past. It is only in Daniel Deronda, after she has been writing for more than twenty years, that George Eliot first ventures to deal with English society of the present day. To this important claim upon our interest may be added a further circumstance which will in the sequel develop into great significance. Daniel Deronda has had the singular fate of being completely misunderstood to such a degree that the greatest admirers of George Eliot have even ventured to call it a failure, while the Philistines have rioted in abusing Gwendolen Harleth as a weak and rather disagreeable personage, Mirah and Daniel as unmitigated prigs, and the plot as an absurd attempt to awaken interest in what is called the religious patriotism of the Jews. This comparative failure of Daniel Deronda to please current criticism and even the ardent admirers of George Eliot, so clearly opens up what is to my view a singular and lamentable weakness in certain vital portions of the structure of our society that I have thought I could not render better service than by conducting our analysis of Daniel Deronda so as to make it embrace some of the most common of the objections urged against that work. Let us recall in largest possible outline the movement of Daniel Deronda. This can be done in a surprisingly brief statement. The book really concerns two people—one is Gwendolen Harleth, a beautiful English girl, brought up with all those delicate tastes and accomplishments which we understand when we think of the highest English refinement, wayward—mainly because she has seen as yet no way that seemed better to follow than her own—and ambitious, but evidently with that sacred discontent which desires the best and which will only be small when its horizon contains but small objects. The other main personage is Daniel Deronda, who has been brought up as an Englishman of rank, has a striking face and person, a natural love for all that is beautiful and noble, a good sense that enables him to see through the banalities of English political life and to shrink from involving his own existence in such littleness, and who, after some preliminary account of his youth in the earlier chapters, is placed before us early in the first book as a young man of twenty who is seriously asking himself whether life is worth living.

It so happens however that presently Gwendolen Harleth is found asking herself the same question. Tempted by a sudden reverse of fortune, by the chance to take care of her mother, and one must add by her own desire—guilty enough in such a connection—for plenty of horses to ride, and for all the other luxurious accompaniments which form so integral a portion of modern English life; driven, too, by what one must not hesitate to call the cowardliest shrinking from the name and position of a governess; conciliated by a certain infinite appearance of lordliness which in Grandcourt is mainly nothing more than a blasÉ brutality which has exhausted desire, Gwendolen accepts the hand of Grandcourt, quickly discovers him to be an unspeakable brute, suffers a thousand deaths from remorse and is soon found—as is just said—wringing her hands and asking if life is worth living.

Now the sole purpose and outcome of the book lie in its answers to the questions of these two young people. It does answer them, and answers them satisfactorily. On the one hand, Gwendolen Harleth, in the course of her married life, is several times thrown with Daniel Deronda; his loftiness, his straightforwardness, his fervor, his frankness, his general passion for whatsoever things are large and fine,—in a word, his goodness—form a complete revelation to her. She suddenly discovers that life is not only worth living, but that the possibility of making one's life a good life invests it with a romantic interest whose depth is infinitely beyond that of all the society-pleasures which had hitherto formed her horizon. On the other hand, Daniel Deronda discovers that he is a Jew by birth, and fired by the visions of a fervent Hebrew friend, he resolves to devote his life and the wealth that has fallen to him from various sources to the cause of reËstablishing his people in their former Eastern home. Thus also for him, instead of presenting the dreary doubt whether it is worth living, life opens up a boundless and fascinating field for energies of the loftiest kind.

Place then, clearly before your minds these two distinct strands of story. One of these might be called The Repentance of Gwendolen Harleth, and this occupies much the larger portion of the work. The other might be called The Mission of Daniel Deronda. These two strands are, as we have just seen, united into one artistic thread by the organic purpose of the book which is to furnish a fair and satisfactory answer to the common question over which these two young protagonists struggle: "Is life worth living?"

Now the painting of this repentance of Gwendolen Harleth, the development of this beautiful young aristocrat Daniel Deronda into a great and strong man consecrated to a holy purpose: all this is done with such skillful reproduction of contemporary English life, with such a wealth of flesh-and-blood character, with an art altogether so subtile, so analytic, yet so warm and so loving withal, that if I were asked for the most significant, the most tender, the most pious and altogether the most uplifting of modern books, it seems to me I should specify Daniel Deronda.

It was remarked two lectures ago that Shakspeare had never drawn a repentance; and if we consider for a single moment what is required in order to paint such a long and intricate struggle as that through which our poor, beautiful Gwendolen passed, we are helped towards a clear view of some reasons at least why this is so. For upon examining the instances of repentance alleged by those who disagree with me on this point—as mentioned in my last lecture—I find that the real difference of opinion between us is, not as to whether Shakspeare ever drew a repentance, but as to what is a repentance. There certainly are in Shakspeare pictures of regret for injuries done to loved ones under mistake or under passion, and sometimes this regret is long-drawn. But surely such reversal of feeling is only that which would be felt by any man of ordinarily manful make upon discovering that he had greatly wronged anyone, particularly a loved one. It is to this complexion that all the alleged instances of repentances in Shakspeare come at last. Nowhere do we find any special portrayal of a character engaged to its utmost depths in that complete subversion of the old by the new,—that total substitution of some higher motive for the whole existing body of emotions and desires,—that emergence out of the twilight world of selfishness into the large and sunlit plains of a love which does not turn upon self,

For example, Leontes, in Winter's Tale, who is cited as a chief instance of Shakspeare's repentances, quite clearly shows by word and act that his regret is mainly a sense of personal loss, not a change of character. He is sorrowful not so much because he has sinned as because he has hurt himself. In Act V. just before the catastrophe which restores him his wife and daughter, we find him exclaiming:

And again in the same scene, where Florizel and Perdita have been brought before him, he cries:

In these it is clear that Leontes is speaking from personal regret; there is no thought here of that total expansion of an ego into a burning love of all other egos, implied in the term repentance, as I have used it. Similarly, King Lear, who has also been cited as an example of Shakspeare's repentances is simply an example of regret for the foulest of wrongs done in a moment of silly passion. After the poor old man, upon regaining his consciousness under Cordelia's tender ministrations, is captured together with Cordelia, in Scene III of Act V, Cordelia says, as if to comfort him:

Here, clearly enough, is regret for his injury to Cordelia, but quite as clearly, no general state of repentance; and in the very few other words uttered by the old king before the play ends surely nothing indicating such a state appears. Of all the instances suggested only one involves anything like the process of character-change which I have called a repentance, such as Gwendolen Harleth's for example; but this one, unfortunately, is not drawn by Shakspeare: it is only mentioned as having occurred. This is the repentance of Duke Frederick in As you Like it. Just at the end of that play, when Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver, and Celia and all the rest have unraveled all their complications, and when everything that can be called plot in the play is finished, the son of old Sir Rowland appears before the company in the wood and calls out:

Here we have indeed a true repentance, but this is all we have of it; the passage I have read contains the whole picture.

If we now go on and ask ourselves why these fascinating phenomena of repentance, which George Eliot has treated with such success, never engaged Shakspeare's energy, we come at the very first step upon a limitation of the drama as opposed to the novel which, in the strongest way, confirms the view I was at such pains to set forth in my earlier lectures of that necessity for a freer form than the dramatic, which arises from the more complete relations between modern personalities and which has really developed the novel out of the drama.

How, for instance, could Shakspeare paint the yeas and nays, the twists, the turns, the intricacies of Gwendolen Harleth's thought during the long weeks while she was debating whether she should accept Grandcourt? The whole action of this drama, you observe, is confined within the small round head of the girl herself. How could such action be brought before the audience of a play? The only hope would be in a prolonged soliloquy, for these are thoughts which no young woman would naturally communicate to any one; but what audience could stand so prolonged a soliloquy, even if any character could be found in whom it would be natural? And sometimes, too, the situation is so subtly complex that Gwendolen is soliloquizing in such a manner that we, the audience, hear her while Grandcourt, who is standing by, does not.

At this point we come upon an element of difference between the novel and the drama which has not hitherto been fairly appreciated, so far as I know. Consider for a moment the wholly supernatural power which is necessarily involved in the project of thus showing the most secret workings of the mind and heart of this young girl Gwendolen Harleth! In real life what power less than God's can make me see the deepest thought and feeling of a fellow-creature? But since the novel is always a transcript of real, or at any rate of possible, life, you observe that wherever these workings of heart and brain are thus laid bare, the tacit supposition is, in plain terms, that God is the writer, or that the writer is a god. In the drama no supposition is necessary because here we become acquainted with only such matters as are shown us in the ordinary way, by scenery or by the speech or gesture of the actor. This consideration seems to me to lift the novel to the very highest and holiest plane of creative effort; he who takes up the pen of the novelist assumes, as to that novel, to take up along with it the omniscience of God. He proposes, in effect, to bring about the revelations of Judgment Day long before the trumpet has sounded. George Eliot shows us the play of Gwendolen Harleth's soul with the same uncompromising fulness with which the most literal believer expects to give account of the deeds done in the body at the last day.

In contemplating this vast ascent from the attitude of the dramatist to that of the novelist—the dramatist is a man; the novelist—as to that novel, is a god—we are contemplating simply another phase of the growth of man from Shakspeare to George Eliot.

And we reach still another view of that growth when we reflect that even if Shakspeare could have overcome the merely mechanical difficulty of presenting a repentance without overmuch soliloquy, he would probably have found but poorly-paying houses at the Globe Theatre to witness any drama so purely spiritual as that which George Eliot has shown us going on upon the little ill-lighted stage of a young girl's consciousness. Just as we found that the prodigious advance in the nearness of man to his fellow from the time of Æschylus to that of George Eliot was implied in the fact that the latter could gather an interested audience about a couple of commonplace children (as in The Mill on the Floss), whilst the former required the larger stimulus of Titanic quarrel and angry Jove; so here we have reached an evidence of still more subtle advance as between the times of Shakspeare and of George Eliot when we find the latter gathering a great audience about this little inward, actionless, complex drama of Gwendolen Harleth, while we reflect that Shakspeare must have his stimulant passion, his crime, his patriotism, and the like, as the only attracting motives. In truth I find what seems to be a cunning indication that George Eliot herself did not feel quite sure of her audience for this same little play. At the end of Chapter XI., she breaks off from a description of one of Gwendolen's capricious turns, and as if in apologetic defense says:

Thus it appears that for Shakspeare to draw such repentances as Gwendolen Harleth's was not only difficult from the playwright's point of view, but premature from the point of view of the world's growth. In truth, I suspect, if we had time to pursue this matter, that we should find it leading us into some very instructive views of certain rugged breaking-off places in Shakspeare. I suppose we must consider the limitations of his time; though it is just possible there may be limitations of his genius, also. We should presently find ourselves asking further how it is that Shakspeare not only never drew a great reformation, but never painted a great reformer? It seems a natural question: How is it, that it is Milton, and not Shakspeare, who has treated the subject of Paradise Lost and Regained; how is it, that the first-class subject was left for the second-class genius? We all know how Milton has failed in what he intended with his poem, and how astonished he would be at finding that the only one of his characters which has taken any real hold upon the world is his Satan. It seems irresistible to ask ourselves why might not our most eloquent tongue have treated our most lofty theme? Or, if we should find special reasons in the temper of his time why Shakspeare could not or should not have treated this theme, we may still ask, why did he never paint for us one of those men who seem too large to be bounded in their affections merely by limits of country, but who loved and worked for the whole world, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mahomet, Socrates, Luther; nay, why may not the master have given us a master's picture of Christopher Columbus, or even of John Vanini, the scientific martyr; even of the fantastic Giordano Bruno, who against all warnings boldly wandered from town to town defending his doctrines until he was burned, in 1600? And if any of the academicians now in my audience should incline to pursue this strange psychologic literary problem, I make no doubt that useful light would be cast upon the search if you should consider along with these questions the further inquiries why Shakspeare never mentions either of the two topics which must have been foremost in the talk of his time: namely, America and tobacco. Among all the allusions to contemporary matter in his plays the nearest he ever comes to America is the single instance in The Tempest, where Ariel is mentioned as "fetching dew from the still-vexed Bermoothes" (Bermudas). As for tobacco; although pretty much all London must have been smoking vigorously about the time Shakspeare was writing Much Ado About Nothing and The Merry Wives of Windsor; although certainly to a countryman not a great while out of the woods of Warwickshire it must have been the oddest of sights to see people sucking at hollow tubes and puffing smoke from their mouths and nostrils; although, too, the comedies of his contemporaries are often cloudy with tobacco smoke: nevertheless there is not, so far as my recollection goes, the faintest allusion to the drinking of tobacco (as it was then called), in the whole body of his writings. Now all these omissions are significant because conspicuous; always, in studying genius, we learn as much from what it has not done, as from what it has done; and if research should succeed in arranging these neglects from any common point of view, it is possible that something new might still be said about Shakspeare.

But, to return to Daniel Deronda. A day or two after George Eliot's death the Saturday Review contained an elaborate editorial summary of her work. For some special ends, permit me to read so much of it as relates to the book now under consideration. "Daniel Deronda is devoted to the whimsical object of glorifying real or imaginary Jewish aspirations. It cannot be doubted that so fantastic a form of enthusiasm was suggested by some personal predilection or association. A devotion to the Jewish cause unaccompanied by any kind of interest in the Jewish religion is not likely to command general sympathy; but even if the purpose of the story had been as useful as it is chimerical and absurd, the inherent fault of didactic fiction would scarcely have been diminished.... It is significant that when George Eliot deliberately preferred the function of teaching to her proper office of amusing she sacrificed her power of instruction as well as her creative faculty."

Of course, in general, no man in his senses thinks of taking in serious earnest every proposition in the Saturday Review. It is an odd character which long ago assumed the role of teasing English society by gravely advancing any monstrous assertions at random and laughing in its sleeve at the elaborate replies with which these assertions would be honored by weak and unsuspecting people. But its position upon this particular point of Daniel Deronda happens to be supported by similar views among her professed admirers.

Even The Spectator in its obituary notice completely mistakes the main purpose of Daniel Deronda; in declaring that "she takes religious patriotism for the subject," though as I have just indicated, surely the final aim of the book is to furnish to two young modern people a motive sufficient to make life not only worth living but fascinating; and of the two distinct plots in the book one—and the one to which most attention is paid—hinges upon Gwendolen Harleth's repentance, while it is only the other and slighter which is concerned with what these papers call religious patriotism, and here the phrase "religious patriotism" if we examine it is not only meaningless—what is religious patriotism?—but has the effect of dwarfing the two grand motives which are given to Daniel Deronda; namely religion and patriotism.

Upon bringing together, however, all the objections which have been urged against Daniel Deronda, I think they may be classified and discussed under two main heads. First it is urged that Daniel Deronda and Mirah—and even Gwendolen Harleth, after her change of spirit—are all prigs; secondly, it is urged that the moral purpose of the book has overweighted the art of it, that what should have been pure nature and beauty have been obscured by didacticism, thus raising the whole question of Art for Art's sake which has so mournfully divided the modern artistic world. This last objection, opening, as it does, the whole question of how far fervent moral purpose injures the work of the true artist, is a matter of such living importance in the present state of our art,—particularly of our literary art; it so completely sums up all these contributory items of thought which have been gradually emerging in these lectures regarding the growth of human personality together with the correlative development of the novel: and the discussions concerning it are conducted upon such small planes and from such low and confusing points of view that I will ask to devote my next lecture to a faithful endeavor to get all the light possible upon the vexed matter of Art for Art's sake, and to showing how triumphantly George Eliot's Daniel Deronda seems to settle that entire debate with the most practical of answers.

Meantime in discussing the other class of objections which we managed to generalize, to wit that the three main characters in Daniel Deronda are prigs, a serious difficulty lies in the impossibility of learning from these objectors exactly what is a prig. And I confess I should be warned off from any attempt at discussion by this initial difficulty if I did not find great light thrown on the subject by discovering that the two objections of prig-ism and that of didacticism already formulated are really founded upon the same cunning weakness in our current culture. The truth is George Eliot's book Daniel Deronda, is so sharp a sermon that it has made the whole English contemporary society uncomfortable. It is curious and instructive to see how unable all the objectors have been to put their fingers upon the exact source of this discomfort; so that in their bewilderment one lays it to prig-ism, another to didacticism, and so on. That a state of society should exist in which such a piece of corruption as Grandcourt should be not only the leader but the crazing fascination and ideal of the most delicate and fastidious young women in that society; that a state of society should exist in which those pure young girls whom George Eliot describes as "the delicate vessels in which man's affections are hoarded through the ages," should be found manoeuvring for this Grandcourt infamy, plotting to be Grandcourt's wife instead of flying from him in horror; that a state of society should exist in which such a thing was possible as a marriage between a Gwendolen Harleth and a Grandcourt; this was enough to irritate even the thickest-skinned Philistine, and this George Eliot's book showed with a terrible conclusiveness. Yet the showing was made so daintily and with so light a hand that, as I have said, current society did not know, and has not yet recognized where or how the wound was. We have all read of the miraculous sword in the German fable whose blade was so keen that when, upon a certain occasion, its owner smote a warrior with it from crown to saddle, the warrior nevertheless rode home and was scarcely aware he had been wounded until, upon his wife opening the door, he attempted to embrace her and fell into two pieces. Now, as I said, just as Daniel Deronda made people feel uncomfortable by even vaguely revealing a sharp truth—so, a prig, so far as I can make out, is a person whose goodness is so genuine, essential and ever-present that all ungenuine people have a certain sense of discomfort when brought in contact with it. If the prig-hater be questioned he will not deny the real goodness of the Daniel Deronda people; he dare not—no one in this age dare—to wish explicitly that Mirah and Daniel Deronda might be less good; but as nearly as anything definite can be obtained what he desires is that the prig should be good in some oily and lubricative way so as not to jar the nerves of those who are less good. Conform, conform! seems to be the essential cry of the prig-haters; if you go to an evening party you wear your dress coat and look like every other man; but if your goodness amounts to a hump, a deformity, we do not ask you to cut it off, but at least pad it; if every one grows as big as you we shall have to enlarge all our drawing-rooms and society will be disorganized. In short, the cry against the prig turns out to be nothing more than the old claim for conformity and the conventional. For one, I never hear these admonitions to conformity without recalling a comical passage of Tom Hood's in which the fellows of a Zoological society propose to remedy the natural defects of animal morphology, such as the humps of dromedaries and the overgrowth of hair upon lions so as to bring all the grotesqueness of the animal creation into more conformity with conventional ideas of proportion. The passage occurs in a pretended report from the keeper of the animals to the President of the society. After describing the condition of the various beasts the keeper proceeds:

Such is the ideal to which the prig is asked to conform, but after the first six lectures of this course we are specially in position to see in all this cry nothing but the old clamor against personality. Upon us who have traced the growth of personality from Æschylus to George Eliot and who have found that growth to be the one direction for the advance of our species this cry comes with little impressiveness.

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