the highest Anglo-Saxon culture and training. To those who take
exception to this, it is answer more than sufficient that, as an artist,
it was necessary to present every typical phase of Jewish character and
life; and we confess there are other passages in the work we could better
spare than these delicious pictures of a London-Jewish pawnbroker at
home.

Of all the characters portrayed in fiction, there is perhaps not one so
difficult to analyse and define as that which stands out so prominently
in this wonderful work, Gwendolen Harleth. At once attractive and
repellent--fascinating in no ordinary degree, and yet, in the estimation
of all around her, hard, cold, and worldly-minded--bewitching, alike from
her beauty, grace, and accomplishments, yet a superficial and seemingly
heartless coquette,--she presents a combination of at once some of the
finest and some of the meanest qualities of woman. Her hardness towards
her fond, doting mother, and her contempt for her sisters, are
conspicuous almost from her first appearance. Her arrogant defiance of
Deronda in the gambling-house, and the fierce revulsion of pride with
which she received the return of her necklace, are entirely in keeping
with these characteristics. And the news of the reduction of her family
to utter poverty awakens no emotion save on her own behalf alone. Yet,
ever and anon, faint gleams of tenderness towards her gentle mother break
forth, though soon obscured by the bitter insistance with which her own
claims to station, wealth, and luxury assert themselves. Her first
acceptance of Grandcourt represents this phase of her twofold nature; her
rejection of him and flight from him, after her interview with Mrs
Glasher, are equally characteristic of the second. That rejection is
actuated much more by resentment against Mrs Glasher, that she should
have dared to anticipate her in anything resembling affection he had to
give, and against him, that he should have presumed to offer to her a
heart already sealed to anything resembling love, than by the faintest
approach to it in her own. The leap, as it were, by which she ultimately
accepts him, is merely a quick, half-conscious instinct to secure her own
deliverance from poverty, and the attainment of those higher external
enjoyments of life for which she conceived herself formed; and if, in
addition, a thought of relieving the wants of her mother and sisters
obtrudes, it holds only a very secondary pl