as asserting and illustrating the highest life of humanity, as a true
preacher of the doctrine of the Cross, even when least formally so, we
leave these features, as well as her position as an artist, untouched on,
the rather that they have all been already discussed by previous critics.

The 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' delicately outlined as they are, still
profess to be but sketches. In them, however, what we have assumed to be
the great moral aim of the writer comes distinctly out; and even within
the series itself gathers in clearness and power. Self-sacrifice as the
Divine law of life, and its only true fulfilment; self-sacrifice, not in
some ideal sphere sought out for ourselves in the vain spirit of self-
pleasing, but wherever God has placed us, amid homely, petty anxieties,
loves, and sorrows; the aiming at the highest attainable good in our own
place, irrespective of all results of joy or sorrow, of apparent success
or failure,--such is the lesson that begins to be conveyed to us in these
"Scenes."

The lesson comes to us in the quiet unselfish love, the sweet hourly self-
devotion of the "Milly" of Amos Barton, so touchingly free and full that
it never recognises itself as self-devotion at all. In "Mr Gilfil's Love-
Story" we have it taught affirmatively through the deep unselfishness of
Mr Gilfil's love to Tina, and his willingness to offer up even this, the
one hope and joy of his life, upon the altar of duty; negatively, through
the hard, cold, callous, self-pleasing of Captain Wybrow--a type of
character which, never repeated, is reproduced with endless variations
and modifications in nearly all the author's subsequent works. It is,
however, in "Janet's Repentance" that the power of the author is put most
strongly forth, and also that what we conceive to be the vital aim of her
works is most definitely and firmly pronounced. Here also we have
illustrated that breadth of nature, that power of discerning the true and