rined friend of the sculptor has proposed that a piece
of ground should be bought, a temporary wooden house built on it, the
statue set up as if in a private courtyard or gallery, and the doors
then thrown open to the public, while, after some days or months, the
building could be taken down, leaving the statue substantially on a
public square. But the prohibition which vetoed the original project
would of course cover this stratagem also, and besides, it would be
rather too petty a device to engage in.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. By George Eliot. Vol. II. New
York: Harper & Brothers.

As a "study of provincial life" _Middlemarch_ appeals to a class of
readers who might have little taste for the psychological studies in
which the book abounds, and which give it a much deeper import. Its
variety, spirit and truth of local color are Hogarthian, while it shows
a figure, in the heroine, of far higher beauty and belonging to the
great circle of epic characters. Dorothea, with her loveliness and her
history of divine blunders, is fit to stand with any queen of song or
story. This volume begins with the closing scenes in her
scholar-husband's life. The character is a curious, and, after all, a
pathetic one. What Philadelphia reader, at least, can pursue the
narrative of poor Casaubon's misplaced study and ill-judged bequest
without being reminded of another career of futile scholarship near
home? Like him, as it will seem to the curious annalist, Richard Rush
was a student without an audience, and like him a mistaken testator.
Locking up his mind from the public amidst a company of ideas imbibed in
the day when his city was the great book-producing city of the country,
Rush prosecuted his barren researches in a moral prison, saw domestic
life only through a grating woven from his own prejudices, and died in
the confidence falsely sustaining him that the inefficiency of a
lifetime would be amended by the bequests of an impracticable will.
Rush, too, was wealthy, of influential family, studious, sterile, and
apt to put off present action in the hope that the grave would one day
co-operate with his motives; and Rush, like the imagined author of the
_Key to all Mythologies_, finds the grave a treacherous trustee. The
heroine of _Middlemarch_, in her action over her husband's testament,
behaves as every true and lovable woman, obeying the emotions, will
behave while the world lasts: