I have thus far limited myself to the purely intellectual side of this question. But man is not all intellect. If he were so, science would, But he feels as well as thinks; I believe, be his proper nutriment.

he is receptive of the sublime and the beautiful as well as of the true. Indeed, I believe that even the intellectual action of a complete man is, consciously or unconsciously, sustained by an undercurrent of the emotions. It is vain, I think, to attempt to separate moral and emotional nature from intellectual nature. Let a man but observe himself, and he will, if I mistake not, find that, in nine cases out of ten, moral or immoral considerations, as the case may be, are the motive force which pushes his intellect into action. The reading of the works of two men, neither of them imbued with the spirit of modern science, neither of them, indeed, friendly to that spirit, has placed me here to-day. These men are the English Carlyle and the American Emerson. I never should have gone through Analytical I never Geometry and the Calculus had it not been for those men. should have become a physical investigator, and hence without them I should not have been here to-day. They told me what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral source. To Carlyle and Emerson I ought to add Fichte, the greatest representative of pure idealism. These three unscientific men made me a practical "Act! I hearkened to the scientific worker. They called out, summons, taking the liberty, however, of determining for myself the direction which effort was to take.

And I may now cry, "Act!" but the potency of action must be yours. I may pull the trigger, but if the gun be not charged there is no result. We are creators in the intellectual world as little as in the physical. We may remove obstacles, and render latent capacities The "new active, but we cannot suddenly change the nature of man. birth" itself implies the pre-existence of the new character which requires not to be created but brought forth. You cannot by any amount of missionary labor suddenly transform the savage into the civilized Christian. The improvement of man is secular, — not the work of an hour or of a day. But, though indubitably bound by our organizations, no man knows what the potentialities of any human mind may be, which require only release to be brought into action.

The circle of human nature is not complete without the arc of feel

W

ing and emotion. The lilies of the field have a value for us beyond their botanical ones, -a certain lightening of the heart accompanies the declaration that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." The sound of the village bell which comes mellowed from the valley to the traveler upon the hill, has a value beyond its acoustical one. The setting sun when it mantles with the bloom of roses the alpine snows, has a value beyond its optical one. The starry heavens, as you know, had for Immanuel Kant a value beyond their astronomical one. Round about the intellect sweeps the horizon of emotions from which all our noblest impulses are derived. I think it very desirable to keep this horizon open; not to permit either priest or philosopher to draw down his shutters between you and it. And here the dead languages, which are sure to be beaten by science in the purely intellectual fight, have an irresistible claim. They supplement the work of science by exalting and refining the æsthetic faculty, and must on this account be cherished by all who desire to see human culture complete. There must be a reason for the fascination which these languages have so long exercised upon the most powerful and elevated minds, — a fascination which will probably continue for men of Greek and Roman mold to the end of time. Let me utter one practical word in conclusion, take care of your health. There have been men who by wise attention to this point might have risen to any eminence, — might have made great discoveries, written great poems, commanded armies, or ruled states, but who by unwise neglect of this point have come to nothing. Imagine Hercules as oarsman in a rotten boat; what can he do there but by the very force of his stroke expedite the ruin of his craft? Take care, then, of the timbers of your boat, and avoid all practices likely to introduce either wet or dry rot among them. And this is not to be accomplished by desultory or intermittent efforts of the will, but by the formation of habits. The will, no doubt, has sometimes to put forth its strength in order to strangle or crush the special temptation. But the formation of right habits is essential to your permanent security. They diminish your chance of falling when assailed, and they augment your chance of recovery when overthrown.

GEORGE ELIOT.

1820

GEORGE ELIOT is the nom de plume of Marian C. Evans, who was born in the North of England about 1820. Of her origin and early history little is publicly known. During her girlhood she went to London, and was fortunate enough to attract the kindly notice of several eminent men of letters, who detected in her the signs of extraordinary intellectual power. Under their direction she entered upon a course of study more severe than is usually attempted by members of her sex. She did not hasten to test her abilities by public appearance in literature, but, for several years before the publication of her first book, pursued her studies assiduously, unknown to the world, yet recognized by the few judicious friends who surrounded and counseled her, as the possessor of exceptional genius. In 1858 her first novel, Adam Bede, appeared, and its reception fully justified the anticipations of her literary sponsors. A few years later it was followed by The Mill on the Floss, and, at intervals, by Romola, etc. With each production her fame increased, and for many years she has held unquestioned rank as first among the novelists of this century. Her last novel, Middlemarch, has had a deserved, and an almost unprecedented, popularity. Two volumes of poetry have come from her pen, both full of strength and beauty, but serving to show that prose fiction is her forte. Her intellect is rather masculine than feminine, and her knowledge of human nature is surprising in one whose sphere of observation must necessarily have been restricted. The careful reader will notice what may be called a lack of cosmopolitanism in her books; she dwells on ground that is familiar to her, - the details of country life, with which she made acquaintance in her youth, and the operations of the human heart and the delineation of character of which her studies and the associations of her later life have made her an intelligent student. Her novels are distinctively intellectual, lacking spirituality and warmth; but as literary compositions, combining profound thought and vigorous, if not brilliant, imagination, they are unsurpassed in English literature. A few years ago Miss Evans became the wife of George Henry Lewes, the celebrated philosophical writer. The extracts are from Middlemarch.

DR. LYDGATE.

A GREAT historian,* as he insisted on calling himself, who had the ́happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium, and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot-house. I, at least, have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing

* HENRY FIELDING, an eminent author of the eighteenth century.

how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch. For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool, and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown,— known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors' false suppositions. There was a general impression, however, that Lydgate was not altogether a common country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an impression was significant of great things being expected from him. For everybody's family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to have immeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish or vicious diseases. The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher intuitive order, lying in his lady patients' immovable conviction, and was unassailable by any objection except that their intuitions were opposed by others equally strong. Nobody's imagination had gone so far as to conjecture that Mr. Lydgate could know as much as Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians who alone could offer any hope when danger was extreme, and when the smallest hope was worth a guinea. Still, I repeat, there was a general impression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than any general practitioner in Middlemarch. And this was true. He was but seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common, at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot.

He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a public school. His father, a military man, had made but little provision for three children; and when the boy Tertius asked to have a medical education, it seemed easier to his guardians to grant his request by apprenticing him to a country practitioner than to make any objections on the score of family dignity. He was one of the rarer lads who early get a decided bent, and make up their minds that there is something particular in life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not because their fathers did it. Most of us who turn to any

subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. Something of that sort happened to Lydgate. He was a quick fellow, and, when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better; but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then read through Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk; and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid. His schoolstudies had not much modified that opinion; for though he his classics and mathematics, he was not pre-eminent in them.

did "

It was said of him that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable. He was a vigorous animal, with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered. Judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life. Probably this was not an exceptional result of expensive teaching at that period of short-waisted coats, and other fashions which have not yet recurred. But, one vacation, a wet day sent him to the small home library to hunt once more for a book which might have some freshness for him: in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty row of volumes with gray paper backs and dingy labels, —the volumes of an old Cyclopedia which he had never disturbed. It would at least be a novelty to disturb them. They were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get them down. But he opened the volume he first took from the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a make-shift attitude, just where it might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valve were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light, startling him with his first vivid notion of finely ad