of the three great novelists of this generation in England. Her tales were universally read. Her commanding genius and literary position were universally acknowledged. But so guarded was the privacy of her life that even her face was unknown to the general public, and the gossip which hummed about all her chief contemporaries spared her.

Certain facts of her career were familiar. But they were few. That she was a scholar, a thinker, the friend of the most accomplished masters in science, philosophy, and art, and that her domestic relations were extraordinary, was substantially all that was known. And an impression undoubtedly prevailed, confirmed by portraits which were sometimes seen, that she was a severe and austere personage, supremely intellectual and "advanced," very much in earnest, but destitute of the charms and graces which are distinguished as womanly. It is most fortunate for one of the most justly famous of English women that the duty of revealing to the public her singularly noble and feminine character should have fallen to one so peculiarly fitted for its performance. Mr. Cross has told the story of George Eliot's life from her own records in her copious correspondence and her journal. He has chosen an original way to do it by blending passages both from the letters and the diary into a continuous narrative, indicating the sources by marginal references. This plan has required of him very few connecting words, and these he has supplied quietly and effectively, and with the utmost tact and good sense.

The general impression of the memoir is that of a woman of great genius, of a character of noble dignity and refinement, of a life and powers constantly consecrated to the humanest ends, and of domestic relations in the highest degree sympathetic, inspiring, and satisfactory to herself. If the story of the Carlyle interior should dispose any reader to imagine that the union of two strong intellectual lives must necessarily be discordant, this pic ture of the unsullied domestic happiness, the mutual mental stimulus and invigoration of George Eliot's household, will correct the tendency. The serene content, the absolute confidence, the increasing respect and affection, which the book discloses, furnish a timely counterpart to the Carlyle story.

The chief distinction of George Eliot's character as shown in this book was her moral independence and courage. Her intellectual superiority, the vigor, originality, and precision of her mind, are evident in her tales, and for pure intellectual grasp and power she must be placed before the three most noted contemporary women-Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, and Mrs. Browning. But if her books reveal her genius, her life displays her character. In June, 1857, she writes to one of her life-long friends a few words which express the profound moral conviction and courage upon which her life was founded. "If I live five years longer, the positive result of my

existence on the side of truth and goodness will outweigh the small negative good that would have consisted in my not doing anything to shock others, and I can conceive no consequences that will make me repent the past. Do not misunderstand me, and suppose that I think myself heroic or great in any way. Far enough from that. Faulty, miserably faulty, I am, but least of all faulty where others most blame."

But while she tranquilly held her own way, the catholicity of her mind and heart is one of the pleasantest disclosures of the memoir. Not only was she wholly unlike the personage which is described as a masculine woman, but she had the gentlest and most generous appreciation of every degree of excellence in others. She speaks of many of her contemporaries and associates, but the tone of detraction to which the recent memoirs of eminent persons have accustomed us is wholly wanting. This appreciation is not a mere gush of good-nature, nor the condescending urbanity of acknowledged superiority; it is a clear perception and an intelligent regard, and it illustrates the sweetness and health of her own nature.

With all her force of character, however,' she was exceedingly distrustful of her literary ability. Her works were all undertaken under a dark cloud of doubt and despondency, and the success which crowned them and the fame which followed were naturally very pleasant to her. She records some of the praise which she received, but wholly without vanity or excitement. It is not the current newspaper praise, but the response of other minds and hearts, which touches her, and she reads with attention any careful and intelligent review of her work. One of the most interesting passages in the memoirs is a letter from Dickens, to whom she had sent a copy of her first book, Scenes of Clerical Life. It is a manly and beautiful letter, showing a fineness of feeling and perception which are not always allowed to Dickens. The incognito had been perfectly kept, even from John Blackwood, the publisher. But Dickens writes that if he obeyed his conviction he should address George Eliot as a woman. Thackeray, on the other hand, said that the author was evidently not a woman.

The relation between George Eliot and John Blackwood, the publisher, who was the first person after Mr. Lewes to recognize her genius, is one of the pleasantest illustrations in literary history of the friendship of authors and publishers. It was like that of Scott and Constable. Mr. Blackwood was her confidant and counsellor, and she was always anxious for his judgment of her work. In her letters to him her good sense and sincerity are constantly apparent, and those who assume the existence of a necessary hostility between authors and publishers will be undeceived by this book.

The memoir can hardly fail to send the

reader to George Eliot's stories once more, and it will throw over them the tender light of the beautiful personality which shines through the story of her life. It is generally true that authors reveal themselves most adequately in their works, and that their biographies strip away the personal illusion which the imagination weaves around the genius which enchants and admonishes and allures. But the Life of George Eliot is one of the very few instances in which the intimate revelation of the author's personality and life height ens the interest and deepens the admiration with which the works of her genius are studied.

THE Completion of the Washington Monument in the city of Washington has recalled national attention once more to the greatest American. The huge shaft is in itself a rather meaningless memorial of a great man, although the same kind of structure on Bunker Hill properly marks to all the neighboring land the site of a great event. The Bunker Hill Monument has fulfilled the lofty anticipation of Webster in his most famous oration: "We wish, finally, that the last object on the sight of him who leaves his native shore, and the first to gladden him who revisits it, may be something which shall remind him of the liberty and glory of his country. Let it rise till it meet the sun in his coming; let the earliest light of the morning gild it, and parting day linger and play on its summit."

The constantly renewed tributes to Washington show how ever fresh is the national love and gratitude. And this feeling survives despite the criticism that he was not a man of genius, and despite, also, the characteristic American irreverence which vulgarizes his name and character in song and anecdote. No man in history is more fully revealed than Washington in every detail of his public and private life. But all the disclosures of all the witnesses and all the records serve merely to complete the symmetry of his greatness. No famous contemporary of his at home or abroad but dwindles a little under the light of increasing information. And the greatest figures of this century also, except Abraham Lincoln, do not gain by fuller revelation of every aspect and detail of their lives.

Some of the noblest and most discriminating praise of Washington has proceeded from Englishmen. The Easy Chair some years ago recalled the tribute of Professor Smyth, in 1812, at Cambridge University, in England. He is alluding in his lectures to the general upheaval at the time of the French Revolution, and the sophistries which in the name of liberty confused so many generous minds, and he says, "But the foundations of the moral world were shaken, and not the understanding of Washington." The greatest of living Englishmen, and the highest in official position, Mr. Gladstone, now says of him: "If among all the pedestals supplied by history for public characters of extraordinary nobility

and purity I saw one higher than all the rest, and if I were required at a moment's notice to name the fittest occupant for it, I think my choice at any time during the last forty-five years would have lighted, as it would now light, upon Washington."

But as the old monks said that to labor is to pray, we may also say that to follow Washington is truly to honor him. The simplicity, directness, and honesty of his political conduct, for instance, the dignity of his disdain of political self-seeking, the independence with which, although a Federalist, he exercised the executive power, the courage of his convictions which made him satisfied with his own approval-as Garfield said there was one man whose good opinion he must be sure of, namely, himself-these are qualities more familiar in Washington than in the career of modern statesmen. Before he was dead, indeed, the party spirit against whose fury he had warned the country was burning fiercely. Before he had left the Presidency he, even Washington, was, in our modern phrase, blackguarded roundly; and no other retir ing President, so far as we recall, was ever assailed, as he left the office, with such savage ribaldry.

Such insults may shake others, but "not the understanding of Washington." The se rene steadfastness of the statesman amidst the storm of political and party passion recalls Parkman's fine picture of the young soldier calm and clear-minded in the disastrous Braddock's defeat. The image of such a man in our history shining, both in peace and war, in political and in military life, not with the meteoric and vanishing splendor of willful and eccentric genius, but with the beneficent and unfading light of the constant duty of the citizen nobly done, is that possession forever which the old Greek historian celebrates, and which may well be the amulet of the national welfare.

THE indignation with which the dynamite crimes are regarded is very much greater than any terror which they produce. The means of criminal mischief were familiar long before the days of Guy Fawkes. Gunpowder and fire, the bullet and the steel, the bravo and the assassin, are all well known. But the ease with which a most destructive explosive can now be manufactured, and the secrecy with which it can be applied to its work, are so tempting to assassins that great catastrophes may be apprehended. But as they are merely wanton crimes, outraging humanity, and involving the lives and happiness of the most innocent persons, as, in fact, they are intended only to produce terror by indiscriminate destruction, they have but one effect-that of intense indignation and desire of vengeance.

If every public building in London should be destroyed by Irish dynamite, the result would be, not Irish independence, but Irish extermination. Carlyle's cynical suggestion

that the true Irish policy would be to put the island under water for twenty-four hours would become the purpose of England. The atrocities of the French Revolution are explicable. They were the mad outbreak of a misery and brutality which the government had fostered, and for which it promised no relief. But this kind of explanation is wanting to the dy namite terrorists. Their conduct might have been extenuated as at least not surprising during the height of the abominable oppression of the penal laws. But for nearly a century there has been a constantly advancing relief of Irish suffering and correction of injustice in Ireland, until now there remains no abuse or inequality for which constitutional agitation is not the surest remedy.

It is true, indeed, that the degradation and ignorance of a large part of Ireland are the logical result of English misconduct. George Mason truly said that Providence punishes national sins by national calamities. But this can not be pleaded in justification of the dynamite crimes. There is no people in the world that follow leadership more loyally than the Irish, and the Irish leaders, like Mr. Parnell and his associates, are neither ignorant nor degraded. Just so far as they yield to the brutality of their followers, they are guiltier than those followers, and the significant fact in the late crimes is not that they were committed, but that Mr. Parnell, speaking in Ireland at the very moment when the whole civilized world protested, said not a single word.

In protection against such attacks the cause of England is the cause of civilization. It is not a question of politics, or of a single national interest, it is that of orderly society against anarchy. But in the indignant pursuit of a crime of this kind there is always a pressure and a tendency to sacrifice general safeguards. This country and all countries will desire to prevent upon their own soil any complicity with the enemies of society, or the dispatch of any aid to them. Yet under the conditions of good government the method is not always obvious or adequate. The appeal for criminal aid may casily be made, and the assistance furnished in ways with which the law can not deal. Open and express incitement to specific crime may be restrained and punished. But

a general arraignment, for instance, of English injustice and crime in Ireland, and a demand for redress, and solicitation of money to procure the means of redress-all these may be put in a way which, in a free country, will not violate the law of a free press, and yet whose criminal intention will be perfectly understood.

66

THE strong, sad, homely" face which is shown in the vignette to this number of the Magazine is that which the country saw when Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President.

A sudden stir and hurry in Broadway by the New York Hotel was remarked by the Easy Chair, and as it looked to see the occasion, it observed an open carriage coming down the street, with a few persons stopping and cheering as it passed. But there was no enthusiasm among the people in the street, and Mr. Lincoln looked about him with the sad eyes and the serious aspect of the portrait.

It was nearly two years afterward that the Easy Chair saw him again, on a Sunday evening in his official room at the White House. He sat by the fire in slippers, talking of the war in the most interested manner, and referring, as he talked, to maps upon the table. As the visitor and his friend arose to leave, Mr. Lincoln arose also, and as he opened the door he stopped, and, laying his hand upon the shoulder of the visitor, he said, in a kindly, paternal tone, and with the same sad weariness in his eyes and manner, "Courage, my son; we shall beat them-we shall beat them."

Two years later it was this face, then no longer smooth, but overgrown with a beard, that the committee of the Convention which had renominated him saw as it stood before him in a semicircle in the East Room at the White House, and heard him read the brief address in which he accepted the nomination.

Another year, and along Broadway, at the same point where the Easy Chair had seen the open carriage, it saw a funeral car moving amid the universal affection and grief of the great city. It passed out of sight amid the love and sorrow of a nation which had taken the dead man into its heart with a tender reverence shared only by Washington.

T may seem to savor of exaggeration, but it is saying no more than its merits warrant, to say that George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and Journals,' arranged and edited

George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and Journals. Arranged and Edited by her Husband, J. W. CROSS. With Illustrations. In Three Volumes, 16mo, pp. 348, 324, and 340. New York: Harper and Brothers.

The Same. "Franklin Square Library." 4to, pp. 82, 76, and 75. New York: Harper and Brothers..

by her husband, J. W. Cross, is a work of transcendent interest, and one of the most perfect examples of mere biographical workmanship in English literature. Undoubtedly there have been lives that were fuller of incident, and richer in striking, imposing, romantic, or moving personal haps and mishaps, than befell George Eliot, although her life was by no means devoid of striking and interesting pas

sages; and therefore when we speak of this memoir as being a work of transcendent interest, we have regard to the fact that it is the record of the interior and spiritual, the intellectual and emotional, rather than of the exterior and strictly personal life of the most largely gifted English woman of her generation. Mr. Cross has done ample justice to his subject in this particular. His account of the life of this remarkable woman, and of her sur roundings and companionships, is full and thoroughly sympathetic; and it includes a close and continuous view of her literary and intellectual tastes and of her inner and spiritual nature, through all their transitions and perturbations, until they flowered in the ripeness of maturity. But if Mr. Cross does this well, he does more than this. He has employed a method in his work which, unless we greatly mistake, is destined to inaugurate a new era in biographical literature, and to render the old and more cumbersome methods distasteful. Justly recognizing the important part which letters play in displaying all the shades of character, and in introducing the reader to the most confidential and most carefully guarded phases of a life, Mr. Cross has made the largest use of them in his memoir, literally allowing the life of George Eliot, to use his own phrase, "to write itself" through her letters and journals, thus imparting to his work the peculiar charm that belongs to the best autobiography. But instead of following the usual course of those biographers who have had the good sense to make the largest use of letters, namely, that of introducing them separately and unabridged, with all their surplusage of immaterial jottings, and all their formalities of superscription, subscription, date, etc., and of bracketing them together as they are able, Mr. Cross has arranged George Eliot's letters and journals in a connected narrative with the least possible interruption of comment. Each letter has been pruned of everything that he deemed irrelevant to the purpose that he held steadily in view, of combining a continuous narrative of day-to-day life, with the play of light and shade which only letters, written in all moods and under various circumstances and environments, can give, the date and name of the person to whom it was addressed being given in the margin. Similar extracts with marginal dates are also given from George Eliot's journals, and these, together with extracts from her books and writings, which have an autobiographical interest as transcripts of her feelings, associations, and opinions, are interwoven with the narrative in the due order of time, and impart to it a rounded fullness and completeness that are very unusual in biography. Again, the slight thread of narrative or explanation-embodying particulars of which he has personal knowledge, or that he has derived from the recollections of some of George Eliot's more intimate friends-occupies an in

side margin, so that the reader will see at a glance what is correspondence, what journalizing, what reminiscence, and what narrative, without any interruption of the attention, and without being subjected to the inconvenience of changes of type and frequent marks of quotation.

It is highly interesting to trace in this admirable memoir the line of demarkation that separates George Eliot's girlhood and womanhood. The girl and the woman are so unlike in many of the aspects of their character, more especially in the sphere of religions feeling and conviction, as to seem two different beings. The girl was marked by a faith in the supernatural as ardent, as humble, and as receptive as the woman was characterized, not merely by the absence and negation of such a faith, but by its denial and complete eradication. The religious ideas, emotions, and convictions of the one had no place in the mind or the heart of the other; and what the one regarded with the most passionate and at times pathetic yearnings and the utmost solicitude, the other regarded at first with indifference, and finally with hostility and contempt. This change can scarcely be ascribed to the great intellectual superiority of the young woman over the young girl who was almost a woman, since there is no evidence of any such superiority. George Eliot was singularly mature at a very early age, and the sudden change to which we have adverted was probably the result of an unconscious reaction, assisted by intimacies and companionships which introduced her to new views, and gave a new bent to her thoughts and feelings, at a time when her mind was peculiarly susceptible to their influence. In one respect, however, there was no change or mark of difference: always and at all times, in girlhood, in young womanhood, and in old age, intense earnestness, absolute absorption in her ideals, and inflexible devotion and entire surrender to her convictions, were characteristics of George Eliot.

Yet more interesting to the general reader are the opportunities which Mr. Cross's memoir gives us of enjoying George Eliot's inimitable descriptions of Weimar, its associations, and its memories of Goethe; of Geneva, Genoa, Rome, Naples, Florence, Berlin, and other Continental tarrying places, whither she resorted in her intervals of rest and recreation; of dallying over her crisp impressions and incisive opinions and criticisms of men and books and things, and noting their gradual mellowing as she gained years and experience; of being admitted behind the scenes of her social and daily life, and of accompanying her in her current readings, literary occupations, and zoological and philosophical excursions; and, above all, of sharing her inmost thoughts as she is engaged in the evolution of the masterly portraits, and the production of the absorbing scenes and incidents, that adorn her magnificent gallery of novels, poems, and romances.

THERE have been few pieces of biographical writing more satisfactory than Mrs. Custer's unpretentious little book called Boots and Saddles.' Much of the charm of the work is due to the writer's entire self-forgetfulness, her unusual absorption in another, her singular lack of selfconsciousness.

It may be said, indeed, and with perfect truth, that Mrs. Custer is really unconscious of what she is doing, unaware of the great worth of her own work as a literary performance. With a modesty of that genuine sort which is the rarest of all things in literature, she mistakes her own purpose, and informs us that she has written for the sake of telling other women how camp life is conducted, what makeshifts are employed to bring something like comfort and grace into garrison homes, what domestic problems are set by circumstances for officers' wives to solve, and what devices they resort to in solving them. Doubtless all this constituted her only conscious object in writing, but, unknown to herself, another and much higher purpose crept into her mind and determined the result. The life she undertook to describe had its sun and centre for her in the personality of the hero who fell fighting in the battle of the Little Big Horn. He was the life of that life, its occasion, its motive, its ceutral figure, and its sole source of interest for her. I recalling the circumstances of her residence in garrison and the memories of her experiences on the march she sees everything in its relation to him, and whatever she has to tell is told with reference to its capacity to illustrate his character, his ways, his personality. The book thus becomes in essence and in fact a biography, though it lacks the biographical form, and touches only a segment of its subject's life, and that not the segment to which a formal biographer would have given his attention chiefly. If we are right in think ing that the real function of biography is not to set the facts of a life in orderly array, but to reveal as completely as possible the character, the inner nature, the actual personality, of its subject, then this is biography in its best estate.

The manner of it is not literary. Almost every page bears witness to the author's lack of literary training and of the merely literary temper. The book is franker than any trained literary hand would or could have made it, and therein lie both its fascination and the secret of its worth.

Here a distinction of some nicety presents itself. It is not unusual for a biographer to hold his subject in unmeasured regard, to assume an attitude of hero-worship, and to devote his efforts from first to last to the one purpose of exalting the character of the person of whom he writes. But commonly such a purpose defeats itself; there are concealments,

Boots and Saddles; or, Life in Dakota with General Custer. By Mrs. ELIZABETH B. CUSTER. 12mo, pp. 312. New York: Harper and Brothers.

suppressions, perversions, and explanations intended to save the subject from all possible discredit, and these, being apparent, operate to modify the reader's judgment and to temper his ardor in accepting his author's opinions. In the present case there is no trace of anything of the kind. The author's faith in her subject's nobility and wisdom is so absolute and unquestioning that utter revelation is her supreme desire. Her confidence is complete that the most unreserved statement of whatever her hero did or said or thought or was must command admiration, and she therefore sets all forth lovingly, and with a degree of confident candor which is hardly to be matched elsewhere in the literature of biography. Nothing that her hero did was ignoble or unworthy or of doubtful propriety; nothing that pertains to him is, in her eyes, too trivial to be recorded; nothing needs suppression, apology, or explanation. She is willing and even eager that her readers shall know the hero of her admiration with the intimate particularity of her own acquaintance with him. She takes us absolutely into her confidence, and tells us freely all that she remembers, trusting us to receive the story with perfect sympathy, and with interest equal to her own.

We have here in actual fact what the novelist most strenuously endeavors to create by simulation, namely, a human life shown as it was lived, a human soul laid bare to our inspection.

Fortunately the subject of the biography was one who could endure such presentation. General Custer seems to have been truly a man of perfect simplicity and nobility of character, a man whose impulses were toward the right, whose strength to follow the lead of such impulses was great, and whose mind was most earnestly given to the conscientious discharge of every duty, to the daily and hourly cultivation of the good that was in his character, and to the suppression and eradication of whatever he deemed weak or unworthy. With great strength and robust vigor of mind and body he combined the utmost gentleness of spirit; with the sternest resolution in the discharge of every duty he united unusual tenderness and a truly extraordinary capacity for sympathy.

Hardly less remarkable than the biographical excellence of the work is its worth as an autobiography. If it reveals to us the man of whom the author is constantly thinking, it also reveals, though quite unconsciously, the woman who shared and illumined his life with the glory of a perfect and utterly unselfish devotion. The revelation is not one to be critically commented upon. We advert to it reverently as a feature of the book quite unintended by the author, and wholly outside the proper limits of critical analysis, but one which no appreciative reader can fail to recognize as a source of infinite fascination.

If it were possible to forget or overlook the charm that lies in the biographical and auto