that the conscious pursuit of happiness as his highest aim tends
inevitably to degrade and enslave him. Even those who read novels more
thoughtfully, who recognise in them a great moral force acting for good
or evil on the age, may be startled to find George Eliot put forward as
the representative of this higher-toned fiction, and as entitled to take
place beside any of those we have named for the depth and force, the
consistency and persistence, with which she has laboured to set before us
the Christian, and therefore the only exhaustively true, ideal of life.

Yet a careful examination will, we are satisfied, show that from her
first appearance before the public, this thought, and the specific
purpose of this teaching, have never been absent from the writer's mind;
that it may be defined as the central aim of all her works: and that it
gathers in force, condensation, and power throughout the series. Other
qualities George Eliot has, that would of themselves entitle her to a
very high place among the teachers of the time. In largeness of
Christian charity, in breadth of human sympathy, in tenderness toward all
human frailty that is not vitally base and self-seeking, in subtle power
of finding "a soul of goodness even in things apparently evil," she has
not many equals, certainly no superior, among the writers of the day.
Throughout all her works we shall look in vain for one trace of the
fierce self-opinionative arrogance of Carlyle, or the narrow dogmatic
intolerance of Ruskin: though we shall look as vainly for one word or
sign that shall, on the mere ground of intellectual power, energy, and
ultimate success, condone the unprincipled ambition of a Frederick, so-
called the Great, and exalt him into a hero; or find in the cold heart
and mean sordid soul of a Turner an ideal, because one of those strange
physiological freaks that now and then startle the world, the artist's
temperament and artist's skill, were his beyond those of any man of his
age. But as our object here is to attempt placing her before the reader