of man, instantly recognizable by every soul of every race,--that they
remain absolutely great, absolutely artistic, in whatever language
they are couched.

For example: if one climbs up for a moment out of that vagueness with
which Biblical expressions, for various reasons, are apt to fall upon
many ears, so that one may consider the clean and virgin quality of
ideas clarified from all factitious charm of word and of
association,--what could be more nearly perfect as pure literature
than this:

      "The entrance of Thy words giveth light;
    it giveth understanding unto the simple.
        I opened my mouth and panted;
    for I longed for Thy commandments.
        Deliver me from the oppression of man:
    so will I keep Thy precepts.
        Order my steps in Thy word,
    and let not any iniquity have dominion over me.
        Make Thy face to shine upon Thy servant;
    and teach me Thy statutes.
        Rivers of waters run down my eyes
    because they kept not Thy law."

Or this:

        "I will lift up mine eyes to the hills
    whence cometh my help.
        My help cometh from the Lord
    which made heaven and earth.
        The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade
    upon thy right hand.
        The sun shall not smite thee by day,
    nor the moon by night.
        The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil:
    He shall preserve thy soul.
        The Lord shall preserve thy going out
    and thy coming in from this time forth
    even for evermore."

Or this, of Isaiah's:

     "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the
     deaf unstopped.

     Then the lame shall leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb
     _shall_ sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and
     streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a
     pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.

     In the habitations of dragons where each lay shall be grass with
     reeds and rushes.... No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous
     beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the
     redeemed shall walk there;

     And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with
     songs of everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy
     and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away."

Or this, from the author of _Job_:

     "Surely there is a vein for the silver and a place for gold where
     they fine it....

     As for the earth, out of it cometh bread: and under it is turned
     up as it were fire.

     But where shall wisdom be found?

     And where is the place of understanding?

     ... The depth saith, it is not in me: and the sea saith, it is
     not with me.

     ... Destruction and death say, we have heard the fame thereof
     with our ears; God understandeth the ways thereof and he knoweth
     the place thereof. For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and
     seeth under the _whole_ heaven;

     ... When He made a decree for the rain and a way for the
     lightning of the thunder:

    Then did He see it and declare it;
    He prepared it, yea, and searched it out.
    And unto man He said: "Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
        and to depart from evil is understanding."

Here it is apparent enough that the moral purpose with which these
writers were beyond all question surcharged, instead of interfering
with the artistic value of their product, has spiritualized the art of
it into an intensity which burns away all limitations of language and
sets their poems as indestructible monuments in the hearts of the
whole human race.

If we descend to the next rank of poetry I have only to ask you to
observe how, in Shakspeare, just as the moral purpose becomes loftier
the artistic creations become lovelier. Compare, for example, the
forgiveness and reconciliation group of plays as they have been
called, _Winter's Tale_, _Henry VIII_, and _The Tempest_, (which must
have been written late in Shakspeare's life when the moral beauty of
large forgiveness seems to have taken full possession of his fancy,
and when the moral purpose of displaying that beauty to his fellow-men
seemed to have reigned over his creative energy): compare, I say,
these plays with earlier ones, and it seems to me that all the main
creations are more distinctly artistic, more spiritually beautiful,
lifted up into a plane of holy ravishment which is far above that of
all the earlier plays. Think of the dignity and endless womanly
patience of Hermione, of the heavenly freshness and morning quality of
Perdita, of the captivating roguery of Autolycus, in _Winter's Tale_;
of the colossal forgiveness of Queen Katherine in _Henry VIII_, of the
equally colossal pardon of Prospero, of the dewy innocence of Miranda,
of the gracious and graceful ministrations of Ariel, of the
grotesqueries of Caliban and Trinculo, of the play of ever-fresh
delights and surprises which make the drama of _The Tempest_ a lone
and music-haunted island among dramas! Everywhere in these latter
plays I seem to feel the brooding of a certain sanctity which breathes
out of the larger moral purpose of the period.

Leaving these illustrations, for which time fails, it seems to me that
we have fairly made out our case against these objections if, after
this review of the connection between moral purpose and artistic
creation we advance thirdly to the fact--of which these objectors seem
profoundly oblivious--that the English novel at its very beginning
announces itself as the vehicle of moral purposes. You will remember
that when discussing Richardson and Fielding, the first English
novelists, I was at pains to show how carefully they sheltered their
works behind the claim of this very didacticism. Everywhere in
_Pamela_, _Clarissa Harlowe_, _Tom Jones_, in the preface, sometimes
in the very title-page, it is ostentatiously set up that the object of
the book is to improve men's _moral_ condition by setting before them
plain examples of vice and virtue.

Passing by, therefore, the absurdity of the statement that the proper
office of the novelist is to amuse, and that when George Eliot
pretended to do more, and to instruct, she necessarily failed to do
either; it is almost as odd to find that the very objectors who urge
the injurious effect of George Eliot's moral purpose upon her work are
people who swear by Richardson and Fielding, utterly forgetting that
if moral purpose is a detriment to _Daniel Deronda_, it is simply
destruction to _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Tom Jones_.

And lastly upon this point, when I think of the crude and hasty
criticism which confines this moral purpose in _Daniel Deronda_ to the
pushing forward of Deronda's so-called religious patriotism in
endeavoring to re-establish his people in the ancient seat of the
Hebrews,--a view which I call crude and hasty because it completely
loses sight of the much more prominent and important moral purpose of
the book, namely, the setting forth of Gwendolen Harleth's repentance;
when, I say, I hear these critics not only assume that Deronda's
mission is _the_ moral purpose of this book, but even belittle that by
declaring that George Eliot's enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of the
Jews must have been due to a chance personal acquaintance of hers with
some fervid Jew who led her off into these chimerical fancies; and
when, I find this tone prevailing not only with the Philistines, but
among a great part of George Eliot's otherwise friends and lovers:
then I am in a state of amazement which precludes anything like
critical judgment on my part. As for me, no Jew--not even the poorest
shambling clothes-dealer in Harrison street--but startles me
effectually out of this work-a-day world: when I look upon the face
of a Jew, I seem to receive a message which has come under the whole
sea of time from the further shore of it: this wandering person, who
without a home in any nation has yet made a literature which is at
home in every nation, carries me in one direction to my mysterious
brethren, the cavemen and the lake dwellers, in the other direction to
the carpenter of Bethlehem, climax of our race. And now, to gather
together these people from the four ends of the earth, to rehabilitate
them in their thousand-fold consecrated home after so many ages of
wandering, to re-make them into a homologous nation at once the newest
and the oldest upon the earth, to endow the 19th Century with that
prodigious momentum which all the old Jewish fervor and spirituality
and tenacity would acquire in the backward spring from such long ages
of restraint and oppression, and with the mighty accumulation of
cosmopolitan experiences; the bare suggestion would seem enough to
stir the blood of the most ungentle Gentile.

But I must hasten to complete the account of George Eliot's personal
existence which we suspended at the point where she had come to London
in 1851.

She had been persuaded to this step by Dr. Chapman, who was at that
time editor of the _Westminster Review_, and who asked her to come and
help him to conduct that publication. At this time she must have been
one of the most captivating companions imaginable. She knew French,
German and Italian, and had besides a good knowledge of Latin, Greek,
Russian and Hebrew. She was a really good player of the piano, and had
some proficiency on the organ; she had already mixed in some of the
best society of London, for, in 1841, her father had moved to
Foleshill, near Coventry, and here she quickly became intimate in the
household of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray, where she met such people as
Emerson, George Combe, Mr. Froude, and many other noted ones of the
literary circles which the Brays delighted in drawing about them; her
mind had been enlarged by the treasures of the Continent which she
visited with her life-long friends, the Brays, in 1849, after the
death of her father, remaining at Geneva after the Brays returned to
England; she had all that homely love which comes with the successful
administration of breakfast, dinner and supper, for her sisters and
brothers had all married, and she lived alone with her father after
his removal to Coventry in 1841, and kept his house for him from that
time until his death, not only with great daughterly devotion but, it
is said, with great success as a domestic manager; besides thus
knowing the mysteries of good coffee and good bread she was widely
versed in theology, philosophy and the movements of modern science:
all of which equipment was permeated with a certain intensity which
struck every one who came near her. With this endowment she came to
London in 1851, as I have said, by Dr. Chapman's invitation, and took
up her residence at Dr. Chapman's house. Here she immediately began to
meet George H. Lewes, Carlyle, Mill and Herbert Spencer. Of her
relations to Lewes it seems to me discussion is not now possible. It
is known that Lewes' wife had once left him, that he had generously
condoned the offense and received her again, and that in a year she
again eloped; the laws of England make such a condonation preclude
divorce; Lewes was thus prevented from legally marrying again by a
technicality of the law which converted his own generosity into a
penalty; under these circumstances George Eliot, moved surely by pure
love, took up her residence with him, and according to universal
account, not only was a faithful wife to him for twenty years until
his death, but was a devoted mother to his children. That her failure
to go through the form of marriage was not due to any contempt for
that form, as has sometimes been absurdly alleged, is conclusively
shown by the fact that when she married Mr. Cross, a year and a half
after Lewes' death, the ceremony was performed according to the
regular rites of the Church of England.

The most congenial of George Eliot's acquaintances during these early days
at the Chapman's in London was Mr. Herbert Spencer. For a long time indeed
the story went the rounds that Mr. Spencer had been George Eliot's tutor;
but you easily observe that when she met him at this time in London she was
already thirty-one years old, long past her days of tutorship. The story
however has authoritatively been denied by Mr. Spencer himself. That George
Eliot took pleasure in his philosophy, that she was especially conversant
with his _Principles of Psychology_, and that they were mutually-admiring
and mutually-profitable friends, seems clear enough; but I cannot help
regarding it a serious mistake to suppose that her novels were largely
determined by Mr. Spencer's theory of evolution, as I find asserted by a
recent critic who ends an article with the declaration that "the writings
of George Eliot must be regarded, I think, as one of the earliest triumphs
of the Spencerian method of studying personal character and the laws of
social life."

This seems to me so far from being true that many of George Eliot's
characters appear like living objections to the theory of evolution.
How could you, according to this theory, evolve the moral stoutness
and sobriety of Adam Bede, for example, from _his_ precedent
conditions, to wit, his drunken father and querulous mother? How
could you evolve the intensity and intellectual alertness of Maggie
Tulliver from _her_ precedent conditions, to wit, a flaccid mother,
and a father wooden by nature and sodden by misfortune? Though surely
influenced by circumstances her characters everywhere seem to flout
evolution in the face.

But the most pleasant feature connected with the intercourse of George
Eliot and Herbert Spencer is that it appears to have been Mr. Spencer
who first influenced her to write novels instead of heavy essays in
_The Westminster_. It is most instructive to note that this was done
with much difficulty. Only after long resistance, after careful
thought, and indeed after actual trial was George Eliot persuaded that
her gift lay in fiction and not in philosophy; for it was pending the
argument about the matter that she quietly wrote _Scenes from Clerical
Life_ and caused them to be published with all the precaution of
anonymousness, by way of actual test.

As to her personal habits I have gleaned that her manuscript was
wonderfully beautiful and perfect, a delight to the printers, without
blot or erasure, every letter carefully formed; that she read the
Bible every day and that one of her favorite books was Thomas à Kempis
on _The Imitation of Christ_; that she took no knowledge at
secondhand; that she had a great grasp of business, that she worked
slowly and with infinite pains, meditating long over her subject
before beginning; that she was intensely sensitive to criticism; that
she believed herself a poet in opposition to the almost unanimous
verdict of criticism which had pronounced _The Spanish Gypsy_,
_Agatha_ and _The Legend of Jubal_ as failing in the gift of song,
though highly poetic; that the very best society in London--that is to
say in the world--was to be found at her Sunday afternoon receptions
at the Priory, Regent's Park, where she and Mr. Lewes lived so long;
and that she rarely left her own home except when tempted by a fine
painting or some unusually good performance of music.

I have given here a list of complete works, with dates of publication,
as far as I have been able to gather. I believe this is nearly
complete.

Translation of Strauss' _Leben Jesu_, 1846; contributions to
Westminster Review, from about 1850, during several years; translation
of Feuerbach's _Essence of Christianity_, 1854; _Scenes of Clerical
Life_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1857,--book-form 1858; _Adam Bede_, 1859;
_The Mill on the Floss_, 1860; _The Lifted Veil_, Blackwood's
Magazine, 1860; _Silas Marner_, 1861; _Romola_, Cornhill Magazine,
book-form, 1863; _Felix Holt_, 1866; _The Spanish Gypsy_, 1868:
_Address to Workmen_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1868; _Agatha_, 1869; _How
Lisa loved the king_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1869; _Middlemarch_, 1871;
_The Legend of Jubal_, 1874; _Daniel Deronda_, 1876; The _Impressions
of Theophrastus Such_, 1879; and said to have left a translation of
_Spinoza's Ethics_, not yet published.

As the mind runs along these brief phrases in which I have with a
purposed brevity endeavored to flash the whole woman before you, and
as you supplement that view with this rapid summary of her literary
product,--the details of fact seem to bring out the extraordinary
nature of this woman's endowment in such a way that to add any general
eulogium would be necessarily to weaken the picture. There is but one
fact remaining so strong and high as not to be liable to this
objection, which seems to me so characteristic that I cannot do better
than close this study with it. During all her later life the central
and organic idea which gave unity to her existence was a burning love
for her fellow-men. I have somewhere seen that in conversation she
once said to a friend: "What I look to is a time when the impulse to
help our fellows shall be as immediate and as irresistible as that
which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling," and the
narrator of this speech adds that at the end of it she grasped the
mantel-piece as if actually saving herself from a fall, with an
intensity which made the gesture most eloquent.

You will observe that of the two commandments in which the Master
summed up all duty and happiness--namely, to love the Lord with all
our heart, and to love our neighbor as ourself, George Eliot's whole
life and work were devoted to the exposition of the latter. She has
been blamed for devoting so little attention to the former; as for me,
I am too heartily grateful for the stimulus of human love which
radiates from all her works to feel any sense of lack or regret. This,
after all--the general stimulus along the line of one's whole
nature--is the only true benefit of contact with the great. More than
this is hurtful. Now a days, you do not want an author to tell you how
many times a day to pray, to prescribe how many inches wide shall be
the hem of your garment. This the Master never did; too well He knew
the growth of personality which _would_ settle these matters, each for
itself; too well He knew the subtle hurt of all such violations of
modern individualism; and after our many glimpses of the heartiness
with which George Eliot recognized the fact and function of human
personality one may easily expect that she never attempted to teach
the world with a rule and square, but desired only to embody in living
forms those prodigious generalizations in which the Master's
philosophy, considered purely as a philosophy, surely excelled all
other systems.

In fine, if I try to sum up the whole work of this great and beautiful
spirit which has just left us in the light of all the various views I
have presented in these lectures, where we have been tracing the
growth of human personality from Æschylus, through Plato, Socrates,
the contemporary Greek mind, through the Renaissance, Shakspeare,
Richardson and Fielding, down to Dickens, and our author, I find all
the numerous threads of thought which have been put before you
gathered into one, if I say that George Eliot shows man what he may
be, in terms of what he is.

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     reading, prepared by_ JAMES M. HUBBARD, _late of the Boston
     Public Library_.

1 vol., crown 8vo., $2.00.

It would be difficult to name any American better qualified than
President Porter to give advice upon the important question of "What
to Read and How to Read." His acquaintance with the whole range of
English literature is most thorough and exact, and his judgments are
eminently candid and mature. A safer guide, in short, in all literary
matters, it would be impossible to find.

     "The great value of the book lies not in prescribing courses of
     reading, but in a discussion of principles, which lie at the
     foundation of all valuable systematic reading."--_The Christian
     Standard._

     "Young people who wish to know what to read and how to read it,
     or how to pursue a particular course of reading, cannot do better
     than begin with this book, which is a practical guide to the
     whole domain of literature, and is full of wise suggestions for
     the improvement of the mind."--_Philadelphia Bulletin._

     "President Porter himself treats of all the leading departments
     of literature of course with abundant knowledge, and with what is
     of equal importance to him, with a very definite and serious
     purpose to be of service to inexperienced readers. There is no
     better or more interesting book of its kind now within their
     reach."--_Boston Advertiser._

     "President Noah Porter's 'Books and Reading' is far the most
     practical and satisfactory treatise on the subject that has been
     published. It not only answers the questions 'What books shall I
     read?' and 'How shall I read them?' but it supplies a large and
     well-arranged catalogue under appropriate heads, sufficient for a
     large family or a small public library."--_Boston Zion's Herald._

_The Boy's Froissart._

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION

By SIDNEY LANIER.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALFRED KAPPES.

One Volume, crown 8vo, extra cloth,--$3.00.

     "_As you read of the fair knights and the foul knights--for
     Froissart tells of both--it cannot but occur to you that somehow
     it seems harder to be a good knight now-a-days than it was
     then.... Nevertheless the same qualities which made a manful
     fighter then, make one now. To speak the very truth, to perform a
     promise to the utmost, to reverence all women, to maintain right
     and honesty, to help the weak; to treat high and low with
     courtesy, to be constant to one love, to be fair to a bitter foe,
     to despise luxury, to pursue simplicity, modesty and gentleness
     in heart and bearing, this was in the oath of the young knight
     who took the stroke upon him in the fourteenth century, and this
     is still the way to win love and glory in the
     nineteenth._"--EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE.

CRITICAL NOTICES.

     "There is no reason why Sir John Froissart should not become as
     well known to young readers as Robinson Crusoe
     himself."--_Literary World._

     "Though Mr. Lanier calls his edition of Froissart a book for
     boys, it is a book for men as well, and many there be of the
     latter who will enjoy its pages."--_N. Y. Eve. Mail._

     "We greet this book with positive enthusiasm, feeling that the
     presentation of Froissart in a shape so tempting to youth is a
     particularly worthy task, particularly well done."--_N. Y. Eve.
     Post._

     "The book is romantic, poetical, and full of the real adventure
     which is so much more wholesome, than the sham which fills so
     much of the stimulating juvenile literature of the
     day."--_Detroit Free Press._

     "That boy will be lucky who gets Mr. Sidney Lanier's 'Boy's
     Froissart' for a Christmas present this year. There is no better
     and healthier reading for boys than 'Fine Sir John;' and this
     volume is so handsome, so well printed, and so well illustrated
     that it is a pleasure to look it over."--_Nation._

     "Mr. Sidney Lanier, in editing a boy's version of Froissart, has
     not only opened to them a world of romantic and poetic legend of
     the chivalric and heroic sort, but he has given them something
     which ennobles and does not poison the mind. Old Froissart was a
     gentleman every inch; he hated the base, the cowardly, the
     paltry; he loved the knightly, the heroic, the gentle, and this
     spirit breathes through all his chronicles. There is a
     genuineness, too, about his writings that gives them a literary
     value."--_Baltimore Gazette._

     "In his work of editing the famous knightly chronicle that Sir
     Walter Scott declared inspired him with more enthusiasm than even
     poetry itself, Mr. Lanier has shown, naturally, a warm
     appreciativeness and also a nice power of discrimination. He has
     culled the choicest of the chronicles, the most romantic, and at
     the same time most complete, and has digested them into an
     orderly compact volume, upon which the publishers have lavished
     fine paper, presswork and binding, and that is illustrated by a
     number of cuts."--_Philadelphia Times._

[**asterism] _For sale by all booksellers, or will be sent, post-paid,
upon receipt of price, by_

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS,
NOS. 743 AND 745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.

_The Boy's King Arthur._

Being Sir THOMAS MALORY'S History of King Arthur and his Knights of
the Round Table.

Edited, with an Introduction, by SIDNEY LANIER.

With 12 Illustrations by ALFRED KAPPES.

One vol., 8vo, extra cloth,--$3.00.

Two famous books--The History of King Arthur, and the inexhaustible
Chronicles of Froissart--have furnished nearly all those stories of
chivalry and knightly adventure that are scattered through all
literatures, and that have been the favorite reading of boyhood for
hundreds of years. Boys of the last few generations, however,--even
though the separate stories in some form will never die out,--have
lost sight of the two great sources themselves, which were in danger
of becoming utterly hidden under cumbrous texts and labored
commentary.

Last year Mr. Sidney Lanier opened one of these sources again by the
publication of his _Boy's Froissart_. He has now performed the same
office for the noble old English of Sir Thomas Malory's History of
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; and under the title of
_The Boy's King Arthur_, has given the _Froissart_ a companion, which
perhaps even surpasses it. However familiar the Arthurian heroes may
be to him, as mere names encountered in poetry and scattered legends,
not one boy in ten thousand will be prepared for the endless
fascination of the great stories in their original shape, and vigor of
language. He will have something of the feeling with which, at their
first writing, as Mr. Lanier says in his preface "the fascinated world
read of Sir Lancelot du Lake, of Queen Guenever, of Sir Tristram, of
Queen Isolde, of Merlin, of Sir Gawaine, of the Lady of the Lake, of
Sir Galahad, and of the wonderful search for the Holy Cup, called the
'Saint Graal.'"

The _Boy's King Arthur_, like the _Froissart_, will have Mr. Alfred
Kappes's vigorous and admirable illustrations; and the subject here
has given him, if possible, even greater opportunity to embody the
spirit of the knightly stories which he has caught so thoroughly.

[**asterism]_The above book for sale by all booksellers, or will be
sent, upon receipt of price, by_

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, PUBLISHERS,
743 AND 745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.

_THE Science of English Verse._

BY SIDNEY LANIER.

1 vol., crown 8vo.--$2.00.

This work marks a distinctly new phase in the study of English
literature--a study to which it is certainly the most noteworthy
American contribution made in many years. It embodies opinions
thoughtfully held, and the results of a well-known thorough
scholarship; and, in spite of its striking originality, it is not in
any sense the mere putting forth of a theory.

Mr. Lanier combats vigorously the false methods which have become
traditional in English prosody, and exposes them in a study of our
older poetry which, with all the peculiar charm of Mr. Lanier's clear
style, is not less attractive to the general reader than valuable for
its results. But the most striking and interesting portion of the book
to every student of letters is the author's presentation of his own
suggestions for a truer method; his treatment of verse almost entirely
as analogous with music--and this not figuratively, but as really
governed by the same laws, little modified. His forcible and very
skillful use of the most modern investigations in acoustics in
supporting this position, makes the book not only a contribution to
literature, but, in the best sense, to physical science; and it is in
this union of elements that the work shows an altogether new direction
of thought.

[**asterism] _This book is for sale by all booksellers, or will be
sent post-paid upon receipt of price, by_

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, PUBLISHERS,
743 AND 745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.