The appearance of the [JIst nUDlber ofDaniel Deronda (William Blackwood and Sons) has been looked for the more anxiously because,: in spite of the popular impatience of the serial method of publication, the numbers of Middlemarch obtained their success seriatim. 'The Spoiled Child' is the heroine of the coming romance; its eponymous hero only appears in the first chapter, where he is introduced in the aSSuDlption ofa silent superiority to the heroine which is not, apparently, intended to have the same peaceable issue as in Felix Holt. The story is one of modern life and society. Gwendolen Harleth is a young lady of twenty, beautiful with the beaute du diable, but with no more pronounced diabolical propensities than a love of life and luxury and an undefmed ambition after some form ofsuperiority or personal ascendancy which should be reconcilable with all the minor good things good society has to offer to brilliant and beautiful girls. In undertaking to represent such a character, and secure attention for the representation, George Eliot is consistent with one of her earliest principles-indifference to the critic saying from his bird's-eye station: 'Not a remarkable specimen; the anatomy and habits of the species have been determined long ago.' George Eliot insists on having the specimen remarked, not because it is rare but because it is real; all the more, indeed, if it is so far from rare that its reality becomes a powerful influence in human life. The representation of this influence of course remains to be developed, and in the meanwhile Gwendolen's individuality is established, like that ofLydgate, by some personal traits that art not commonly supposed to be associated with the general type of character, though a minutely analytical psychology might perhaps

show the connexion to have a root in the nature of things. Thus Gwendolen is superstitious, subject to an inexplicable dread ofsolitude, darkness, and any other physical suggestion of the existence of natural forces inaccessible to the influence of human wills. Again, though possessing all the vanity and coldness of a coquette, 'a certain fierceness of maidenhood' made her object to being directly made love to, and 'the life of passion had begun negatively in her' when a pleasant boycousin ventures to offend this instinct; but she has also still enough childish naivete to carry this grievance to her mother, for whom she has a childishly selfish but genuine affection. One or two paragraphs seem to suggest that we are to have in Daniel Deronda a treatment (perhaps more full and central than before) of the question presented in some of the writer's other works, namely, by what property of the natural order it comes to pass that the strength of innocent selfregarding desires is a moral snare unless balanced by some sense of external obligation, or in other words, why egotism is a term of reproach, however fascinating its human habitation. Rex (Gwendolen's cousin) has a vague inlpression, when he wants to go and bury his dejection in the backwoods, 'that he ought to feel-if he had been a better fellow he should have felt-more about his old ties.' In the Spanish Gypsy the 'old ties' ofhereditary race-feeling are idealised into a symbol of the strongest bond of human fellowship. In Middlemarch, on the other hand, it is noticed as a popular error that 'we are most of us brought up to think that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is sOlnething irrespective of the beings who suffer the wrong;' and the reason that the severe morality of the Mill on the Floss failed to content some critics seems to have been that there also the ultimate sanction by which right doing was enforced appeared to be only the reluctance to give pain to other persons whose desires were not in any way necessarily more moral or exalted than those of the agent. Without wishing the objective vigour ofthe author's imaginative creations to be clouded by a transparent didactic purpose, her readers may not unnaturally look for an imaged solution of the logical dilenlma-If the desires of A are not a trustworthy guide for A's conduct, how can they be a safe moral rule for B; and, conversely, how is A to be more secure in following B's desires than his own? Or, if the strength of moral ties lies rather in their association with the permanent as opposed to the ephenleral experiences of life, than in their association with altruistic as opposed to egoistic impulses, it will still have to be shown-though not of course proved-how and wherein the permanent conditions of life