397, c. 6), in the Council in Trullo in Constantinople (A.D. 692, c. 83), in that of Auxerre (A.D. 578, c. 12), in the canons of Boniface, bishop of Maintz (can. 20). Gregory of Nazianzum (Orat. 40) utters a serious warning against it.' (P. 585.)

These extracts may serve as some imperfect specimens of the treatment of one particular class of subjects; but it is only by a systematic examination of the kindred topics scattered throughout the work that an adequate idea can be formed of its value to the intelligent student of the religious and social life of the early Church. In the more general questions of Christian archæology, many of the articles are in truth exhaustive, though compendious, treatises of their particular subject. The article CATACOMBS, for instance, may truly be described as a complete repertory of all the best and most recent information as to the origin, the history, and the present condition of the ancient Christian cemeteries. Some persons, indeed, might even be disposed to take exception to the wideness of the scope of the work, and to the comprehensive principle which it follows in the selection of topics, some of which may appear to overstep the limits of sacred archæology, and to trench upon the neutral domain of classical antiquity. Thus a long and learned article is devoted to what may seem the purely secular subject of COMMERCE, another to that of Actors and Actresses, and another to the civil establishment of the Public Post (CURSUALES EQUI) at Rome. But these and all similar articles will be found to have a clear and most important bearing on the general scope of the work. The article Commerce is not a mere survey of the commerce of the ancient world, but a most interesting review of the relations of the Church from the earliest times to trade and commerce, of the legislation of the Councils regarding certain trades and occupations, and of the laws as to clerical trading. The Public Post is noticed as illustrating the civilising influence of Christianity in the special legislation under the Christian Emperors regarding the manner of driving the horses, which is described as anticipating the labours of the Society 'for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.' The article on Actors and Actresses is a most learned and instructive account of the circumstances of that profession as it existed in the ancient world, and independently of its literary value is most important as explaining as well the motives and moral policy as the progress and variation of Church legislation on the subject.

6

So again it might be asked, what place there is in a Dictionary of Christian Antiquities for the purely Roman institution of INFORMERS (Delatores) an institution which

existed at Rome before the Christian Era, and indeed before the establishment of the Empire. Yet the article shows what an important part this odious organisation must have played in the persecutions against the Church. It was not simply on account of their obnoxious doctrines that the Christians fell within the cognisance of the official delator. Under the provisions of the Lex Julia de Majestate,' all secret assemblies for worship were amenable; and, in addition to the motive of religious hostility, the delatores would propose to themselves both profit and credit with the civil authorities in turning against Christians, not merely as Christians, but also as violators of the common law of Rome, the powerful and wide-spread organisation which was at their command. Hence the details of delatio' in relation to the Church form a most important chapter of early Christian history. We find the Emperors alternately patronising and discouraging the system. Strange as it may appear, Tertullian represents Tiberius as restraining the accusers of the Christians; and he makes the same statement as to M. Aurelius, although there can be no doubt that persecution was active under his reign. On the other hand, Pliny's well-known letter to Trajan exhibits the 'delatores' at full work under that Emperor. Christians were delated' in great numbers; and Trajan's cruelly inconsistent reply to Pliny's inquiry as to the course to be taken regarding them has often been commented upon, from the days of Tertullian

to our own.

It would be foreign to the purpose of this paper to enter into any criticism of the articles on Ritual and Church Law; but the Ecclesiological articles, and in general those relating to Sacred Art, are exceedingly able and interesting. The single article Churches' contains almost everything that need be known on the subject of Ecclesiology during its early period. Sacred Symbolism too is treated not alone with great learning but in a spirit at once reverential and intelligent; and the articles on Music, Hymnology, Calendar, and Church Festivals, are equally deserving of praise.

We cannot hesitate to say that if the work be completed in the same spirit and with the same ability, it will remain a monument of scholarship and taste not unworthy of the very highest names in the Theological Literature of the English Church.

ART. VI.-Daniel Deronda. 4 vols. 12mo. By GEORGE ELIOT. Edinburgh and London: 1876.

THE THE career of George Eliot as a novelist has been a very remarkable one. She has had no preliminary struggle to go through, no uphill toil, no slow approaches to the admiration and attention of the public. Beginning with mature powers, and that command of her tools and knowledge of her material which only full development can bring, she seized at once upon that better part of the public which forms the taste of the world; and since then her progress has been from triumph to triumph, an almost uninterrupted course of appreciation and success. It does not always happen that those who hold the position of authorities in the literary world have the power of conferring anything that deserves the name of fame -indeed, it happens not unfrequently that their verdict, though so far respected by the public as to gain for their nominee a place upon some dusty shelf or step going the way of reputation, is never frankly endorsed or received with acclamations by that broader mass of readers who form the final tribunal. But in George Eliot's case the critics only at best preceded the public by a single step. A more unanimous and a more enthusiastic verdict has rarely been got by any competitor for the prizes of literature. She has outstripped even those who hold the highest place among the kindred writers who were a little way before her in the race. There are many, to whom Bulwer Lytton is nauseous, and Thackeray cynical, and Dickens vulgar, who have nothing but unbounded admiration to give to the author of Adam Bede' and Silas Marner.' Her insight, her wisdom, her power, her tenderness, her knowledge of human nature, have scarcely ever been called in question; and at length the very critics who helped to make it have grown timid before this universal fame. Having thrown ourselves, with a completer worship than any other writer has obtained for some generations, before the feet of this great writer, the storm of applause which we have aided in calling up has alarmed and silenced us by its thunders. It is amusing to see how the weekly censors of the newspapers have shifted and hesitated in their attempts to modify the enthusiasm without committing themselves with the mass of enthusiasts, in whose eyes any failure in veneration for their favourite author would be a kind of crime; and the boldest has held his breath when venturing to express a faint and timid disagreement with the great novelist, or even a doubt of her absolute

skill, power, and success. of popular esteem is in itself a great and very unusual attainment. Scott did it in his day; but even the reputation of Scott was perhaps less dazzling, insomuch as it was the franker, simpler enthusiasm of a world not so full of illuminati as at the present moment, and which was more simply enthralled by the charm of story, the picturesqueness, the variety, the flood of life, which poured over the country at the frank and manly touch of the homelier Scotch Shakspeare, whose kind, broad, genial imagination created but did not analyse. The work of George Eliot claims to be something more than this, and is certainly something quite different. It is founded, not upon story, not upon creation, but on that anatomy of meaning and motive, that profound investigation and research into the workings of the heart, which is at least a higher intellectual exercise, if not a higher effort of genius; and which, attracting most of all the keener intelligences among the crowd, becomes by degrees a kind of intellectual standard by which the general opinion is formed. This is made evident by the fact that the individual in ordinary society, who ventures to express disapproval of George Eliot's works, requires a very large amount of sincere stupidity or confidence, and that it amounts to something like self-conviction of dullness to avow it boldly. Hence a great deal of spurious enthusiasm and false applause, which, being without any real foundation of understanding, is delusive in the highest degree-an injury at once to the writer and to the public taste. Indeed, besides being acknowledged on all hands as a woman of great and noble genius, and placed by universal consent at the head of the fiction writers of the time-and a very long way beyond any of them, in the opinion of her warmest admirers at least -George Eliot has also had the less desirable fortune of becoming the fashion, so that everything has concurred in securing her fame.

To have reached to this height

A fame more thoroughly deserved has seldom existed. Writers more versatile, more sensitive to the varying phantasmagoria of life and all its perpetual change and play of meaning even more sympathetic, answering more warmly and divining more delicately the touches of feeling that are as ripples on the water and as shadows on the mountains-there have been and are; but none more nobly conscious of the larger developments of nature, or able to trace with a more masterly hand the growth of character and the deeper convulsions that affect it. We are not sure that any woman writer, with a mind so broad, so large, so able to conduct a mental

VOL. CXLIV. NO. CCXCVI.

H H

investigation to the end, so little apt to be seduced into digression, or moved into change of purpose, has ever been. The breadth of the full, clear, homely landscape, both earth and heaven, is in her contemplative eye, which misses nothing, and makes no partial sketch. It is not always so, even with the most accomplished literary artist; sometimes the landscape is too great for him, confuses him, misleads him into dabs of colours and misty vagueness, or drives him into a corner with some miniature scene which is within his compass, and which he represents to be the world. But George Eliot is above this weakness of vision, this blurred or microscopic sight. With a calm and steady power she looks abroad, undismayed by the breadth of the scene, seeing all its details in full roundness, with their atmosphere about them, lucid, impartial, certain: the individual life she treats-great as her power in dealing with that-being in the first place almost subsidiary to the general effect of the large and fully furnished picture. It is not only Mrs. Poyser, but all her surroundings, the tranquil fields, the bustle of serene business in the farmhouse, and all the rural concerns around, which fill up and perfect that study of homely English existence, with all its quaint realism, its close observation, its shrewd traditionary wisdom. This was the greatest charm of the earlier stories, in which there are none of those creations which have a kind of independent existence, and which form an author's highest title to fame. The Scenes of Clerical Life' did not add any new inhabitants to the world, though there is abundance of character and life in them; for even the sweet and noble wife of Amos Barton, a sketch most true, impressive and deeply felt, was neither sufficiently original nor sufficiently wrought out to take a permanent place among the creations of genius; and these tales, though they must always have delighted the generation for which and among which they were produced, would have had little claim upon posterity on their own account. In 'Adam Bede,' however, the author rose to a higher level, and measured herself for the first time by the supremest test of poetical power. The figure of Hetty is like nothing that art had before developed out of nature, and yet it is profoundly true, with a reality in it which makes the heart ache. The very landscape, hitherto so broad and large and calm, changes and intensifies round this being, so tragical in her levity and shallowness. Never was the hapless simpleton, strange mixture of innocence and that self-love which is the root of ill. deserving of her fate, yet not deserving, in her lightness and reckless ignorance, of any such tremendous encounter with