den, where these worn-out humbugs may be
preserved. It is but justice that we should keep them, since we have
spoiled them for any honest trade. Let them sit on soft cushions, and
have their dinner regularly, but, for heaven's sake, preserve me from
sentimentalising over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions
of unfed souls and bodies. Surely he is not so Ahab-like as to wish that
the revolution had been deferred till his son's days: and I think the
shades of the Stuarts would have some reason to complain if the
Bourbons, who are so little better than they, had been allowed to reign
much longer.'

The hopes of '48 were not very accurately fulfilled, and in George Eliot
they never came to life again. Yet in social things we may be sure that
undying hope is the secret of vision.

There is a passage in Coleridge's _Friend_ which seems to represent the
outcome of George Eliot's teaching on most, and not the worst, of her
readers:--'The tangle of delusions,' says Coleridge, 'which stifled and
distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the
parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a
salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant
care, the gradual improvement, the cautious and unhazardous labours of
the industrious though contented gardener--to prune, to strengthen, to
engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the
slug and the caterpillar.' Coleridge goes farther than George Eliot,
when he adds the exhortation--'Far be it from us to undervalue with
light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our
predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence to which the
blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext.'

George Eliot disliked vehemence more and more as her work advanced. The
word 'crudity,' so frequently on her lips, stood for all that was
objectionable and distasteful. The conservatism of an artistic moral
nature was shocked by the seeming peril to which priceless moral
elements of human character were exposed by the energumens of progress.
Their impatient hopes for the present appeared to her rather
unscientific; their disregard of the past very irreverent and impious.
Mill had the same feeling when he disgusted his father by standing up
for Wordsworth, on the ground that Wordsworth was helping to keep alive
in human nature elements which utilitarians and innovators woul