be introduced into some six stations on the British Isles, of which one should form the central station, to which the records of all the others should be sent for reduction and publication. They suggested Kew Observatory as perhaps the best for this office; and when it is recollected that the employment of photography to self-recording meteorological instruments was first introduced in this Observatory, we think the selection of Kew on the part of the Royal Society was only a just tribute to its past exertions and present standing. From what we have previously said our readers will perceive that the employment of self-recording instruments is quite essential to the progress of meteorology, and we earnestly hope that this proposal of the Committee will not fall to the ground from want of Government support. In fine, a considerable extension and modification of the present system is advocated in this report, the reporters recommending that the Kew Committee should take charge of the whole branch We shall only remark that if they are willing to do so, it could not be put into better hands. We indeed rejoice to think that there is now a likelihood of a systematic and earnest pursuit of meteorology, under the auspices of the British Government, and especially are we glad to think that self-recording instruments are likely to be established. In this respect meteorology is behind terrestrial magnetism, although the former is the more popular and immediately practical science of the two. But when a beginning has once been made by our Government, it is almost certain that it will be followed up by the Continental nations; so that possibly at no distant date Europe may be sprinkled over with observatories in each of which selfrecording meteorological instruments are at work. But while we heartily agree with the conclusions arrived at by the Committee, we hardly think they have done justice to the late Admiral Fitzroy. Of his sincerity of mind and scientific earnestness there can be no question. There can be as little question that his system of storm-warnings has been of great public benefit--has, in fact, been the saving of many lives. His was the bold strong hand of a pioneer that quarried the stone-it will remain with others to rear the edifice. If in another branch of his work he wanted method, he himself was the chief sufferer. His genius and his untiring energy have conduced to the lasting benefit of his country. The faults he had have only hastened his own untimely and lamented death. ART. VII.-1. Scenes of Clerical Life. By GEORGE ELIOT. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 2. 3. 4. 1858. Adam Bede. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1859. The Mill on the Floss. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1860. Silas Marner. 1 vol. Edinburgh, 1861. 5. Romola. 3 vols. London, 1863 6. Felix Holt. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1866. SOME years ago general attention was arrested by a series of stories then appearing in Blackwood's Magazine, under the title of Scenes of Clerical Life. These tales did not win their way very rapidly, nor were they ever, perhaps, in the strict sense of the word, popular. But eventually their reputation extended beyond the class of ordinary novel-readers; and they gained from their admirers an enthusiastic admiration, more to be relied on than any mere noisy popularity. From the nature of the tales this was what might have been expected. They were almost entirely without incident, and were therefore wanting in what is commonly called interest-a want which, in nine cases out of ten, would be fatal to the success of magazine stories. Worse than this, they were all melancholy; and nothing alienates the casual reader so much as a persistent tone of sadness. On the other hand, readers who can dispense with excitement, and who do not turn from the aspect of sorrow, were fascinated by a rare beauty of style, a loftiness of tone beyond common, a reach of thought and command of passion which challenged comparison with the masters of literature. So far as popularity is concerned, Adam Bede was a great advance from the Scenes of Clerical Life; and then came in succession the books which are at the head of this article, and which have gained for George Eliot a place second to none among the living writers of English fiction. Her reputation grew with each successive effort; and Felix Holt especially has been received with universal pæans of delight. Two of our ablest living critics, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Palgrave, take frequent occasion to lament the want in English literature of anything like sound criticism. Mr. Arnold is quite plaintive on this theme: "Almost the last thing for which one would come to English literature is just that very thing which now Europe most desirescriticism." Mr. Palgrave puts it more gently, when he laments "that deficiency in independent taste which is, it may be feared, in some ways characteristic of Englishmen. In picture-buying, at any rate, precedent and fashion are too often dominant." Pre cedent and fashion dominate just as much in judging of novels as in judging of pictures. It was long before the "independent taste of our critics recognised the merits which put George Eliot's writings on a totally different platform from the trash the present enormous supply of which is a disgrace to our literature; and now, when the fashion has set in, praise is lavished on her later works, in terms which would require modification if applied to the greatest masters of fiction. With much of this praise we heartily concur; from some of it we are constrained to dissent. For example, when a critic declares it certain that if people were to take to heart the lessons which Felix Holt contains, "the next generation would rise to a moral excellence far above that of to-day, and leave many meannesses and miseries under their feet," we feel that a position is claimed for George Eliot as the teacher of a morality purer and more exalted than that which generally regulates the lives of mankind, or which animates the pages of ordinary writers. We greatly doubt whether she is entitled to this position; and on this point alone to say nothing of matters of more strictly literary aspect-it may be worth while shortly to examine George Eliot's works. and the treacherous calms were to him alike unknown. Considering George Eliot as a writer generally, without having regard to her special vocation as a writer of novels, criticism cheerfully recognises many rare excellences. First among these, of common consent, must be placed her style. It would be flattery to place her on a level with Thackeray. But now that we have lost Thackeray, she is in this point above all others. Trollope, indeed, has a merit of his own; but his easy naturalness is altogether on a lower level. George Eliot's style is rich in beauty and power. It is a splendid vehicle. We can often mark its effect in raising the thought to a dignity greater than its own. Her wealth of allusion is considerable, and it is indicated with becoming reserve, not ostentatiously obtruded, as is the fashion with most of our present novelists; to borrow a graceful simile from Mr. Hannay, it is like "violets hidden in the green of her prose." Above all, her style is not the result of art only; it has that indescribable stamp which marks it as the result of feeling and thought. The thought may not be always deep, the feeling may not be always right, but both are uniformly original and sincere. The following passage from one of her early writings exhibits some of her characteristic excellences, and shows also the wide sympathies and large charity of the Dr. Johnson defines a novel as "a smooth tale, generally of love.' Definitions, like the syllogism, are often unequal to the subtlety of nature; certainly Johnson's defini-writer:tion of the novel is altogether unequal to the subtlety and variety of modern fiction. The favourite novels now-a-days are far from being "smooth tales," and the love of which they tell is too often a distorted image of what he meant by the word. To George Eliot's writings the definition is peculiarly inadequate. The deep tide of passion in her tales, breaking against harsh circumstance, cannot flow smoothly; and of all her novels, perhaps The Mill on the Floss alone is, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, a love-story. In fact, story-telling at all is not her forte. Her great characteristic is her knowledge of human nature, and the grasp of thought with which she seizes and brings before us its most hidden secrets. Scott said of Richardson that "in his survey of the heart he left neither head, bay, nor inlet behind him until he had traced its soundings, and laid it down in his chart with all its minute sinuosities, its depths, and its shallows." More than even this may be said with truth of George Eliot. She has sounded, with no less accuracy than Richardson, the depths and the shallows of every little bay; and she has ventured boldly on distant seas, of which the storms "Yes, the movement was good, though it had that mixture of folly and evil which often makes what is good an offence to feeble and fastidious minds, who want human actions and characters riddled through the sieve of their own ideas, before they can accord their sympathy or admiration. Such minds, I dare say, would have found Mr. Tryan's character very much in need of that riddling process. The blessed work of helping the world forward happily does not wait to be done by perfect men, and I should imagine that neither Luther nor John Bunyan, for example, would have satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero, who believes nothing but what is true, feels nothing but what is exalted, and does nothing but what is graceful. The real heroes, of God's making, are quite different: they have their natural heritage of love and conscience which they drew in with their mother's milk; they know one or two of those deep spiritual truths which are only to be won by long wrestling with their own sins and their own sorrows; they have earned faith and strength so far as they have done genuine work: but the rest is dry barren theory, blank prejudice, vague hearsay. their sympathy is perhaps confined in narrow Their insight is blended with mere opinion; conduits of doctrine instead of flowing forth with the freedom of a stream that blesses every weed in its course; obstinacy or self-assertion will often interfuse itself with their grandest | sobs. And yet there was a loving human being impulses; and their very deeds of self-sacrifice close beside her, whose heart was aching for are sometimes only the rebound of a passionate hers, who was possessed by the feeling that she egoism. So it was with Mr. Tryan: and any was miserable, and that he was helpless to one looking at him with the bird's-eye glance soothe her. But she was too much irritated by of a critic might perhaps say that he made the the idea that his wishes were different from mistake of identifying Christianity with a too hers, that he rather regretted the folly of her narrow doctrinal system; that he saw God's hopes than the probability of their disappointwork too exclusively in antagonism to the ment, to take any comfort in his sympathy. world, the flesh, and the devil; that his intel- Caterina, like the rest of us, turned away from lectual culture was too limited-and so on; sympathy which she suspected to be mingled making Mr. Tryan the text for a wise discourse with criticism, as the child turns away from the on the characteristics of the Evangelical school sweetmeat in which it suspects imperceptible in his day. medicine." "But I am not poised at that lofty height. I am on the level and in the press with him, as he struggles his way along the stony road, through the crowd of unloving fellow-men. He is stumbling, perhaps; his heart now beats fast with dread, now heavily with anguish; his eyes are sometimes dim with tears, which he makes haste to dash away; he pushes manfully on, with fluctuating faith and courage, with a sensitive failing body; at last he falls, the struggle is ended, and the crowd closes over the space he has left. "One of the Evangelical clergy, a disciple of Venn,' says the critic from his bird's-eye station. Not a remarkable specimen; the anatomy and habits of his species have been determined long ago.' "Yet surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him-which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work, the life and death struggles of separate human beings." As a contrast with this, take a passage, very graceful in description and true in feeling, from what we think the purest and most beautiful of all her tales, "Mr. Gilfil's Love-story: " "They reached the flower-garden, and turned mechanically in at the gate that opened, through a high thick hedge, on an expanse of brilliant colour, which, after the green shades they had passed through, startled the eye like flames. The effect was assisted by an undulation of the ground, which gradually descended from the entrance-gate, and then rose again towards the opposite end, crowned by an orangery. The flowers were glowing with their evening splendours: verbenas and heliotropes were sending up their finest incense. It seemed a gala where all was happiness and brilliancy, and misery could find no sympathy. This was the effect it had on Caterina. As she wound among the beds of gold and blue and pink, where the flowers seemed to be looking at her with wondering elf-like eyes, knowing nothing of sorrow, the feeling of isolation in her wretchedness overcame her, and the tears, which had been before trickling slowly down her pale cheeks, now gushed forth accompanied with | And again, in quite a different style trotted along and sat down together, with no "It was one of their happy mornings. They thought that life would ever change much for them: they would only get bigger and not go to school, and it would always be like the holidays; they would always live together and be fond of each other. And the mill with its they played at houses-their own little river, blooming-the great chestnut-tree under which the Ripple, where the banks seemed like home, and Tom was always seeing the water-rats, while Maggie gathered the purple plumy tops of the reeds, which she forgot and dropped afterwards-above all, the great Floss, along which they wandered with a sense of travel, to see the rushing spring-tide, the awful Eagre, come up like a hungry monster, or to see the Great Ash which had once wailed and groaned like a man-these things would always be just the same to them. Tom thought people were at a disadvantage who lived on any other spot Christiana passing "the river over which there of the globe; and Maggie, when she read about is no bridge," always saw the Floss between the green pastures by the Great Ash. "Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,-if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass-the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows-the same red-breasts that we used to call "God's birds," because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known? "The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet-what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this homescene? These familiar flowers, these wellremembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows, such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the | ing branches, and the red, warm blood is language that is laden with all the subtle inex-darkly feeding the quivering nerves of a sleeptricable associations the fleeting hours of our less memory that watches through all dreams. childhood left behind them. Our delight in These things are a parable." the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in us, and transform our perception into love." It is not too much to say, that from few novelists in the English language could passages be selected giving evidence of such varied power. On the other hand, George Eliot is often forgetful of the beauty of simplicity. Her richness of language sometimes makes her style ornate and overloaded; her eagerness of thought leads her into complexity and confusion of expression. It is impossible to avoid the comparison with Thackeray, for she resembles him closely in the device of interweaving reflection and comment with the story; and it is in such passages that both writers reach their greatest wonders of style. At her best she falls short of his exquisite simpliciity, which sprang from the delicate reserve of his nature, and carried with it a suggestive power over the heart of the reader, reaching far beyond the actual written word; of his complete appropriateness, never too much or too little; of his finished beauty of language, like crystal, at once clear and splendid. And in some of her favourite fine passages, that is, in her worst, there is a gaudiness of diction and a vagueness of thought-sometimes descending to mere rhodomontade. We could quote many passages in support of this criticism. We select three, all from the first volume of Felix Holt: Another quality of George Eliot's writings which has attracted unbounded admiration, is the humour they are thought to display. When Adam Bede appeared, we remember an able critic gave her credit for a more infinite humour than that of Scott. Now, while her writings sparkle with wit, we should have doubted their claims to be considered humourous, in the proper sense of the word. It is a delicate matter to discriminate between these wayward faculties; and we have no wish to enter upon a wellworn controversy. worn controversy. We can never hope to come to any definite conclusion; the question whether or not a writer is humourous must be always very much answered according to individual fancy. The dogmas of another eminent critic as to Scott are even more bewildering. In Mr. Senior's Essays, lately republished, are included elaborate criticisms of the Waverley Novels which originally appeared in the Quarterly Review. There, amid many able and acute remarks, we find great objection taken to Sir Walter Scott's "bores," as the critic calls them; and among these are particularly specified-the Antiquary and Dugald Dalgetty! Views like these, coming from such a quarter, puzzle us amazingly, and suggest the idea, which had best be frankly expressed, that Scott's most characteristic excellence is missed by many of his readers, especially his Southern readers. To our thinking, the humour of George Eliot is as a shadow beside that of the Ariosto of the North. It is often purely verbal, as in the following examples, in the former of which the affected style of phraseology introduced "The sensitive little minister knew instinctively that words which would cost him efforts as painful as the obedient footsteps of a wound-by Mr. Dickens is very apparent :— ed bleeding hound that wills a foreseen throe, would fall on this man as the pressure of tender fingers falls on a brazen glove." "For there is seldom any wrong-doing which does not carry along with it some downfall of blindly-climbing hopes, some hard entail of suffering, some quickly-satiated desire that survives, with the life in death of old paralytic vice, to see itself cursed by its woful progeny -some tragic mark of kinship in the one brief life to the far-stretching life that went before, and to the life that is to come after, such as has raised the pity and terror of men ever since they began to discern between will and destiny." us "Do you know the dulcet strength, the animating blandness of tea sufficiently blended with real farmhouse cream? No-most likely you are a miserable town-bred reader, who think of cream as a thinnish white fluid, delivered in infinitesimal pennyworths down area steps; or perhaps, from a presentiment of calves' brains, you refrain from any lacteal addition, and rasp your tongue with unmitigated bohea. You have a vague idea of a milch cow as probably a white-plaster animal standing in a butterman's window, and you know nothing of the sweet history of genuine cream, such as Miss Gibbs's." "The poets have told of a dolorous en- "I've nothing to say again' her piety, my chanted forest in the under world. The thorn- dear; but I know very well I shouldn't like bu-hes there, and the thick-barked stems, have her to cook my victual. When a man comes human histories hidden in them; the power of in hungry an' tired, piety won't feed him, I unuttered cries dwells in the passionless-seem-reckon. Hard carrots 'ull lie heavy on his At its best, her humour is hard, resting less upon habits of thought than upon point and force of expression. In the mouths of Florentine magnates Mrs. Poyser's keen proverbs are dignified into grave aphorisms: "Friendliness is much such a steed as Ser Benghi's, it will hardly show much alacrity unless it has got the thistle of hatred under its tail"-but the style of thing is the same, exceedingly clever and witty, not, we think, humourous. How hard, and how wanting in mobility is even Mrs. Poyser beside Mause Headrigg or Jenny Dennison! And, as is always the case with wit of this description, it is too universal. George Eliot is guilty of the error to which masters of verbal wit are prone, namely, that all her characters are witty. She is not such a sinner in this respect as some-as Sheridan, for example; but the fault is there. Her characters range over all ranks of society, and represent many modes of thought; they speak in various dialects; but they express themselves always with a force and vigour, often with a wit, which strikes the reader as unnatural. As it is with her characters, so also with her humourous scenes. The " High Life Below Stairs," in the first volume of Felix Holt, has been the subject of much exaggerated praise. The fun of it consists almost solely in some very clever "chaff" on a heavy-minded butler by a flippant valet the leading feature of which is rather ponderous jesting on the butler's name. The alehouse scene in Silas Marner is in a higher style. But neither of them can stand for one moment beside the post-office scene in the Antiquary, where Mrs. Mailsetter and two of her cronies are "sorting" the letters before they are delivered. The interlocutors are three-Mrs. Mailsetter herself, the bakers's wife, and the butcher's wife: each has plainly a character of her own, and thinks and speaks in strict accordance therewith; not one of them even makes a remark that strikes us as unusually clever or unusually well put, and yet all Fairport is taken through hands by these chattering old women;-and what humour there is in the contrast between their various points of view and estimates of character, in their characteristic squabble, and the still more characteristic compromise by which it is healed, the naturalness and perfect keeping of the whole! George Eliot's jocular incidents may be dismissed in a line. They are too absurd. The "Florentine Joke" in Romola, where baby; a preposterous mock play-bill in a monkey is brought to a doctor as a sick "Janet's Repentance;" the triumph of a servant over his rival by the daring exploit of cutting off his coat-tails when he was sleeping-dwelt upon at great length in Felix Holt as a thing of infinite jest,-these three examples are enough to show that George Eliot has no comprehension of that branch of the ludicrous which is called fun. She perhaps reaches to humour in her children, and that because she thoroughly understands children, and can enter into their every thought. The childhood of Maggie and Tom Tulliver makes the first volume of The Mill on the Floss quite different from the other two. Gleams of bright humour, too, come with the golden-haired child into the house of Silas Marner. But beyond this we cannot go. Heartily as we admire George Eliot's brilliant wit, we cannot hold her entitled to a foremost place among humourists. As a rule, women do not appreciate humour; they never excel in it. If it be true, as the author of Friends in Council says, that a man's humour is the deepest part of his nature, this is not to be wondered at. Howsoever able they may be, women can hardly have the mental reach or experience required to embrace the whole of man's nature. And besides, and what is perhaps more to the purpose, the vagaries of this faculty are repugnant both to their tastes and to their prejudices. We have next to consider George Eliot with special reference to her vocation as a novelist. That her literary career has fallen on a time when it is the imperative mode to write stories, has been in some respects an advantage to her; in some the reverse. She possesses many of the qualifications necessary for the novelist; in others again she is conspicuously deficient. In the first place, we think she seriously errs in the choice of her stories. They are uniformly of a painful nature. We are far from saying that pain or sorrow should be excluded from fiction; but it must not occupy a too prominent place. Nor can the pain in George Eliot's tales be held as falling under the imposing name of tragedy. The tragic is separated from the merely painful or sorrowful by differences hard to state clearly, but not therefore fanciful. Tragic feeling in the old time sprang from sources different from those which gave it birth among the moderns. Greek tragedy concerned itself, for the most part, with the actions of the gods, at best of demigods, and |