udied by George Eliot as in
this character. His career is minutely traced from step to step of his
downfall, and with a remarkable faithfulness and courage. The effects of
vice and sin are nowhere so finely presented and with such profound ethical
insight. A careful study of this character alone will give a clear
comprehension of George Eliot's conception of retribution, how the natural
laws of life drag us down when we are untrue to ourselves and others. It is
a great moral lesson presented in this character, a sermon of the most
powerful kind. Nemesis follows Tito ever onward from the first false step,
lowers the tone of his mind, corrupts his moral nature, drags him into an
ever-widening circle of vice and crime, makes him a traitor, and causes him
to be false to his wife. Step by step, as he gives way to evil, we see the
degradation of his heart and mind, how the unfailing Nemesis is wreaking
its vengeance upon him. He is surely punished, and his death is the fit end
of his career. We are shown how his evil deeds affect others, how the great
law of retribution involves the innocent in his downfall. Here George Eliot
has unfolded for us how true it is that our lives are linked on every side
with the lives of our fellows, and how the deeds of any one must affect for
good or evil the lives of many others.

Almost every leading thought of George Eliot's philosophy and ethics is
unfolded in greater or less degree in this novel. It is full of brave,
wholesome teaching, and of clear insight into the consequences of conduct.

_Romola_ is the most thoughtful, the most ambitious, the most philosophical
of George Eliot's works; and it is also the most lacking in spontaneity,
and more than any other shows the evidences of the artist's labors. Yet
by many persons it will be accepted as the greatest of her works, and
not without the best of reasons. It contains some of her most original
characters, gives a remarkable emphasis to great moral laws, and interprets
the spiritual influence of the conflict which is ever waging between
tradition and advancing culture as no other has done. It is a
thought-provoking book, a book of the highest moral aims.

XV.

FELIX HOLT AND MIDDLEMARCH.

The scenes of George Eliot's later novels are laid in England, but for the
most part among a town rather than a rural population. Instead of Hayslope
and Raveloe, Mrs. Poyser and Silas Marner, we have Middlemarch and Treby
Magna, Dorothea Br