indulgence, and there is no reason to believe that her marriage would call for any sacrifice of them. So, when poverty comes, she is not scrupulous in her means to avert it, and gradually infiltrates into the mind of her husband natural and baser motives, that lead him to less worthy actions, and to results most dangerous to his fate and fame.

George Eliot only allows us one happy combination out of the Three Love Problems' that are presented to our consideration. A sharp and gay young man, whose sole virtue is that he will not go into the Church because he does not think himself fit for it, is transformed into a useful man of business and a creditable life by an honest passion for a dear, plain, intelligent girl. Their adventures of themselves compose a pleasant story, and have little bearing on the tragic features of the book. They afford, however, the author the opportunity of introducing some of those masterly pictures made up of Wilkie and wit, which rest on the imagination like actual scenes on the eye. There are three connected with the last illness of a miserly farmer which will not fail to be repeated in dramatic and pictorial form-the Waiting for Death, the last struggle, and the reading of the will. We extract the death-scene, of which the two personages are the bed-ridden invalid and his niece, Mary Garth, who has the old man's nephew for her lover. Mary is simply watching by the bed-side. She had no pathos about its selfish occupant, for to be anxious about a soul that is always snapping at you 'must be left to the saints of the earth, and Mary was not one of them.' The old man speaks:

6

"You hearken, Missy. It's three o'clock in the morning, and I've

got all my faculties as well as ever I had in my life. I know all my property, and where the money's put out, and everything. And I've made everything ready to change my mind, and do as I like at the last. Do you hear, Missy? I've got my faculties."

"Well, sir?" said Mary, quietly.

'He now lowered his tone with an air of deeper cunning. "I've made two wills, and I'm going to burn one. Now you do as I tell you. This is the key of my iron chest, in the closet there. You push well at the side of the brass plate at the top, till it goes like a bolt: then you can put the key in the front lock and turn it. See and do that; and take out the topmost paper-Last Will and Testament-big printed." ""No, sir," said Mary, in a firm voice, "I cannot do that." ""Not do it? I tell you, you must," said the old man, his voice beginning to shake under the shock of this resistance.

"I cannot touch your iron chest or your will. I must refuse to do anything that might lay me open to suspicion."

"I tell you, I'm in my right mind. Shan't I do as I like at the last? I made two wills on purpose. Take the key, I say."

"No, sir, I will not," said Mary, more resolutely still. Her repulsion was getting stronger.

"I tell you, there's no time to lose."

"I cannot help that, sir. I will not let the close of your life soil the beginning of mine. I will not touch your iron chest or your will." She moved to a little distance from the bedside.

'The old man paused with a blank stare for a little while, holding the one key erect on the ring; then with an agitated jerk he began to work with his bony left hand at emptying the tin box before him.

"Missy," he began to say, hurriedly, "look here! take the money -the notes and gold-look here—take it—you shall have it all-do as I tell you."

He made an effort to stretch out the key towards her as far as possible, and Mary again retreated.

""I will not touch your key or your money, sir. Pray don't ask me to do it again. If you do, I must go and call your brother."

'He let his hand fall, and for the first time in her life Mary saw old Peter Featherstone begin to cry childishly. She said, in as gentle a tone as she could command, "Pray put up your money, sir;" and then went away to her seat by the fire, hoping this would help to convince him that it was useless to say more. Presently he rallied and said eagerly

"Look here, then. Call the young chap. Call Fred Vincy." 'Mary's heart began to beat more quickly. Various ideas rushed through her mind as to what the burning of a second will might imply. She had to make a difficult decision in a hurry.

"I will call him, if you will let me call Mr. Jonah and others with him."

""Nobody else, I say. The young chap. I shall do as I like." ""Wait till broad daylight, sir, when every one is stirring. Or let me call Simmons now, to go and fetch the lawyer. He can be here in less than two hours."

Nobody shall know

"Lawyer? What do I want with the lawyer? -I say, nobody shall know. I shall do as I like." ""Let me call some one else, sir," said Mary, persuasively. She did not like her position-alone with the old man, who seemed to show a strange flaring of nervous energy which enabled him to speak again and again without falling into his usual cough; yet she desired not to push unnecessarily the contradiction which agitated him. "Let me, pray,

call some one else."

"You let me alone, I say. Look here, Missy. Take the money. You'll never have the chance again. It's pretty nigh two hundredthere's more in the box, and nobody knows how much there was. Take it and do as I tell you.”

'Mary, standing by the fire, saw its red light falling on the old man, propped up on his pillows and bed-rest, with his bony hand holding out the key, and the money lying on the quilt before him. She never forgot that vision of a man wanting to do as he liked at the last. But the way in which he had put the offer of the money urged her to speak with harder resolution than ever.

"It is of no use, sir. I will not do it. Put up your money. I will not touch your money. I will do anything else I can to comfort you; but I will not touch your keys or your money."

""Anything else-anything else!" said old Featherstone, with hoarse rage, which, as if in a nightmare, tried to be loud, and yet was only just audible. "I want nothing else. You come here you come here."

'Mary approached him cautiously, knowing him too well. She saw him dropping his keys and trying to grasp his stick, while he looked at her like an aged hyena, the muscles of his face getting distorted with the effort of his hand. She paused at a safe distance.

""Let me give you some cordial," she said, quietly," and try to compose yourself. You will perhaps go to sleep. And to-morrow by daylight you can do as you like."

He lifted the stick, in spite of her being beyond his reach, and threw it with a hard effort which was but impotence. It fell, slipping over the foot of the bed. Mary let it lie, and retreated to her chair by the fire. By-and-by, she would go to him with the cordial. Fatigue would make him passive. It was getting towards the chillest moment of the morning, the fire had got low, and she could see through the chink between the moreen window-curtains the light whitened by the blind. Having put some wood on the fire and thrown a shawl over her, she sat down, hoping that Mr. Featherstone might now fall asleep. If she went near him the irritation might be kept up. He had said nothing after throwing the stick, but she had seen him taking his keys again and laying his right hand on the money. He did not put it up, however, and she thought that he was dropping off to sleep.'

Of course the old creature dies in the dawn; and we wonder whether, years after, when Mary and the young chap were Man and Wife, they ever talked over this scene and calculated how a different conduct would have affected their mutual fortunes.

To most readers the figure of the religious and criminal Banker will appear the most forcible portion of the story. It has, however, little real bearing on any of the three groups of character, but touches each of them with sufficient art not to seem intrusive. It is a solemn study of complicated humanity which the writer puts before you with little or no judgment of his own, but on which every reader will think for himself. It is not even for the weaver to test the worth and strength of this mixed woof of conscience and self-excuse, of reverence for the supernatural and disregard of mankind. We hear daily of the Italian brigand praying for the success of his violences, and combining, uncensured by the public opinion of his country, deep devotion with cruelty and fraud. Why is this delusion, if delusion it be, to be confined to the Roman Catholic faith-why should it be irreconcilable with the various

forms of Protestant emotion? Hypocrisy is an easy phrase under which the ignorance of the motives of others masks itself, and those who by the constitution of their own minds have always connected piety with morality naturally shrink from such a psychological monster as a religious criminal. Yet our time has witnessed more than one instance of men who have become amenable to the severest judgments of the law, whose lives have been models of private morality, and who have been objects of reverence in the religious world. In the portraiture of Mr. Bulstrode there is nothing sensational; he might have become the confidential agent of the Nonconformist interest at Middlemarch by a natural sympathy of religious notions, and without any false professions or intentional deceit. His frequent Evangelical phraseology may have been matter of habit not of ostentation, and when at last he succumbs to the indefinite temptation of letting a man die whose existence was a curse to himself and no benefit to anyone, he falls a victim rather to the judicial spirit of romance than to the ordinary vengeance of society on rich and respectable men. A man of Mr. Bulstrode's wealth and position in Middlemarch, with a large religious party at his back, would hardly have been crushed by the discovery that before he came to that centre of all the commercial and domestic virtues, he had had certain equivocal domestic relations, or had derived his wealth from a somewhat dirty business; and when he lay under a vague suspicion of prematurely removing a compromising enemy, some positive proof of these accusations would have been required before he was driven in disgrace from the locality. On the other hand, there is much truth in the indication that a peculiar profession of religion is a great encumbrance to a man who finds himself under such indefinite imputations. For him the outer world will make no allowances; his assumed spiritual superiority has been a standing reproach to all who take a lower standard of life, and they are delighted to make him pay for it. Instead of mitigating the judgment of mankind by the consideration that the leaven of conscience may have preserved the man from becoming utterly bad and even limited the injury he has inflicted on others, he is condemned more unscrupulously than the defaulter who is not supposed to have been restrained by any higher motive than his own interest. And the reaction on the supposed criminal himself is no doubt naturally delineated in the meekness Bulstrode shows at the first uprise of popular indignation. A bold bad man would have put a better face on the matter, or at least have called for more unprejudiced testimony against him. But

between him and the truth there stood the phantom of his own high standard of life, and he may have been unjust, even to himself in his ready acceptance of the condemnation of others who knew nothing of his struggles and temptations. Such a man would naturally have stood on a lofty pedestal in his own family circle, and the penalty of his fall is drawn with awful fidelity.

'Mrs. Bulstrode locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk steadily to the place allotted her. A new searching light had fallen on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently: the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him. Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited dishonour as bitter as it could be to any mortal.

But this imperfectly-taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly cherished her-now that punishment had befallen him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him. There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach. But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life. When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker; they were her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible that she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation. She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown, and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair, she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made her look suddenly like an early Methodist.

'Bulstrode, who knew that his wife had been out and had come in saying that she was not well, had spent the time in an agitation equal to hers. He had looked forward to her learning the truth from others, and had acquiesced in that probability, as something easier to him than any confession. But now that he imagined the moment of her knowledge come, he awaited the result in anguish. His daughters had been obliged to consent to leave him, and though he had allowed some food to be brought to him, he had not touched it. He felt himself perishing slowly in unpitied misery. Perhaps he should never see his wife's face with affection in it again. And if he turned to God there seemed to be no answer but the pressure of retribution.

'It was eight o'clock in the evening before the door opened and his