field, carrying upon its bosom no craft that would draw more water than the curving leaf of a wild-rose floating down stream, too small in volume to dream of a mill-wheel and turning nothing more pra

he aptest physical semblance of that spiritual phenomenon which we witnessed at our last meeting, when in tracing the quiet and mentally wayward course of demure Marian Evans among the suave pastorals of her native Warwickshire, we came suddenly upon th

y about a century before; to note more particularly what were the precise gains to humanity which Thackeray and Dickens had poured in just at this tim

tion down to the unsavory muck in which its roots are imbedded. This, however, is what one must do when

us as it was unlooked for b

ary departure from the wild and complex romances-such for example, as Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia-which had formed the nearest approach to the modern novel until then. A

ers to arrange indexes and to write prefaces and dedications. It so happened that on a certain occasion he was asked by two booksellers to write a

ing an actual story he had once heard which gave him a sort of basis, he takes for his heroine a simple servant-girl, daughter of Goodman Andrews, a humbly born English farmer, rather sardonically names her Pamela after the Lady Pamela in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, carries her pure through a series of incredibly villainous plots against her by the master of the house where she is at service, and who takes advantage of the recent death of

course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and ... promote the cause of religion and virtue;" and in the preface to the continuation before-mentioned, he remarks as follows: "The two former volumes of Pamela met with a success greatly exceeding the most sanguine expectations; and the editor hopes" (Richardson calls himself the editor of the letters), "that the letters which compose these will be found equally written to nature, avoiding all romantic flights, improbable surprises, and irrational machinery; and that

d of the whole contemporary world, saturated himself with such a flame of saintliness as to have burnt out every particle of any little misdemeanors he may have been guilty of in his previous existence; and I need only read you an occasional line from the first four letters of the third volume in order to show the marvellous sentimentality, the untruth towards nature, and the purely commercial view of virtue and of religion which make up this intolerable book. At the opening o

nty upon plenty; see barns well stored, poultry increasing, the kine lowing and crowding about us, and all fruitful; and are bid to call all these our own. And then think that all is the reward of o

period of time occupied by him in retiring, and, as one hopes, dividing his blessing impa

ing what I had written, in order to carry on the thread,

is only fair to suppose that the honest Andrews manages

ntly

' continued the dear obliger, 'in the same county, because I would wish two counties to be blessed for their sakes.'... I could only fly to his generous bosom ... and with my eyes swimming in tears of grateful joy ... bless God and bless him with my whole heart; for speak I could not! but almost choked with joy, sobbed to him m

n we have this purely com

her husband's) "advances in piety are owing not a little to them ... then indeed may we take the pride to t

e same letter, s

for your honesty, I for my humility and virtue;" so that now I have "nothing to do but to reap all the rewards which this life can

y of worldliness, but of "other-worldli

e, is duly rewarded: but Mr. B., with all his villainy, certainly fares better than Pamela: for he not only receives to himself a paragon of a wife, but the sole operation of his previous villainy towards her is to make his neighbors extol him to the s

s the son of a joiner; at any rate, he puts forth a set of exactly opposite characters to those in Pamela, takes a footman for his virtuous hero, and the footman's mistress for his villainous heroine, names the footman Joseph Andrews, explaining that he was the brother of Richardson's Pamela, who, you remember, was the daughter of Goodman Andrews, makes principal f

st described, though the tone is more clownish. But for particular purposes of comparison with Dickens and George Eliot hereafter, let me recall to you in the briefest way two of the comic scenes. That these are fair samples of the humorous atm

landlord is surly, and presently behaves uncivilly to Joseph Andrews; whereupon Parson Adams, in defence of his lame friend, knocks the landlord sprawling upon the floor of his own inn; the landlord, however, quickly receives reinfo

agant, mindful

rst, and is mistakenly introduced by her to her husband as "a man come for some of his hogs." Trulliber immediately begins to brag of the fatness of his swine, and drags Parson Adams to his stye, insisting upon examination in proof of his praise. Parson Adams complies; they reach the stye, and

that Fielding tells us what o'clock it is, while Richardson shows us how the watch is made; and this, as characterizing

fficiently described as a patient analysis of the most intolerable crime in all history or fiction, watered with an amount of

appeared; a work differing in motive, but not in moral tone, from

1749 Fielding prints his Tom Jones, which some consider his greatest book. The glory of Tom Jones is Squire Allworthy, whom we are invited to regard as the most miraculous product of the divine creation so far in the shape of man; but to your present lecturer's way of thinking, the kind of virtue represented by Squire Allworthy is completely summed in the following sentence of the work introducing him in the midst of nature: it is a May morning, and Squire Allworthy is pacing the terrace in front of his mansion before sunrise; "when," says Fielding, "

erhaps necessary to mention farther only his Amelia, belonging to the year

leasures of Imagination. Akenside, who is represented as the host in a very absurd entertainment after the ancient fashion. In 1752 Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom gave the world a new and very complete study in human depravity. In 1769, appeared his Adventures of an Atom; a theme which one might suppose it difficult to make indecorous; and which was really a political satire; but the unfortunate liberty of locating his atom as an organic particle in various parts of various successive human bodies gave Smollett a field for indecency which he cultivated to its utmost yield. A few months before his death

concluding the Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, which by the way is told

Jones at Bra

Jon

pasture of our affairs. We were yesterday three kiple chin

ble servant had on a plain pea-green tabby sack, with my runnela cap, ruff toupee, and side-curls. They said I was the very moral of Lady Rickmanstone but not so pale-that may well be, for her ladyship is my elder by seven good years or more. Now, Mrs. Mary, our satiety is to suppurate; and we are coming home"-which irresistibly reminds us of the later Mrs. Malaprop's famous explanation in The

ur

loy

eople who love the book; but to me, when you sum it all up, its teaching is that a man may spend his life in low, brutish, inane pursuits, and may have a good many little private sins on his conscience, but will, nevertheless, be perfectly sure of heaven if he can have retained the ability to weep a maudlin tear over a tale of distress; or, in short, that a somewhat irritable state of the lachrymal glands will be cheerfully accepted by the Deity as a substitute for saving grace or a life of self-sacrifice. As I have said, these four

deeper reasons than those which Roger Bacon gave for sweeping away the works of Aristotle, if I had my way with these classic books I would blot them from the face of the earth. One who studies the tortuous behaviors of men in history soon ceases to wonder at any human inconsistency; but, so far as I can marvel, I do daily that we regulate by law the sale of gunpowder, the storage of nitro-glycerine, the administration of poison-all of w

matter so well that I must clinch my opinion with her word

nger, over wh

g wayfaring s

cious of the

azzling in hi

own way, he an

oks! Ah, you!-y

'A fair day!'-y

t could happen

de a fountain

ld of books is

gs in it are

sant. For the

angels. Every kn

m elemental

ife. The beauti

eauty, and th

of wea

, There's no lack, neither,

ophet teaches i

y-who j

d you leave That child to

nocent smile ag

the catacom

n the flutteri

ter round him?

ghtful to find a snow-drop springing from this muck of the cla

urg-the old poet mentions in one of his letters to Zelter the strong and healthy influence of this story upon him, just at the critical point of his mental development; and yesterday while reading the just published Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle I f

Meister, and eagerly read it through; my sally out, after finishing, along the vacant streets of Edinburgh, a windless, Scotch-misty morning, is still vivid to me. 'Grand, serenely, harmoniously built together, far-seeing, wise and true. Where

rld in 1814; and during the intervening period from this book to the Vicar of Wakefield perhaps there are no works notable enough to be mentioned in so rapid a sketch as this unless it be the society novels of Miss Burney, Evelina and Cecilia, the dark

products of scientific observation and carries them up into a higher plane and incarnates them into the characters (as we call them) of a book, and makes them living flesh and blood like ourselves-to effect this, there must be a true incorporation and merger of the scientific and poetic faculties into one: it is not sufficient if they work side by side like two horses abreast, th

Plants, by Dr. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather, I believe, to our own grave and patient Charles Darwin. The Loves of the Plants is practically a series of little novels in which the heroes and heroines belong to the vegetable world. Linn?us had announced the sexuality of plants, and so had made this idea a principle of

overing sylphs

little hands yo

steps print you

rdant to the ti

notes I tune

amorous sorro

, that wave the

ss that clings

Beauties crowd

win their ve

l Canna lifts

, and plights h

air, in milder

blast of Autu

fair he folds

timorous beauty

he next flower he happened to reach-the Genista or Wild Broom-there were ten stamens to one pistil; that is, ten lovers to one

enista[A] in th

rothers woo th

mes within a mere ace of beau

ultured lawns an

n flings her h

uous waves the

ir leafy honors

aps collects th

insect sinks be

air Tulipa th

infant close

cave, secure

courtship of s

arising in it; and its oddity is all the more increased when one finds here a number of the most just, incisive, right

net," from the original name-giver's habit of weari

rarer and rarer, health so poor, I so occupied, etc., etc. He had something of original and sarcastically ingenious in him; one of the sincerest, naturally honest, and most modest of men; elder brother of Charles Darwin (the famed Darwin on Species of these days), to whom I rather prefer him for intellect, had not his health quite doomed him to silence and patient idleness-grandsons, both, of the first famed Erasmus ('

g, always healthy, always miraculous. And I can only give now a hasty additional flavor of these Scott days by reminding you of the bare names of Thomas Hope, Lockhart, Theodore Hook, Mrs. Trollope, Mrs. Gore and Miss Mitford. It seems always comfortable in a confusion of this kind to have some easily-remembered formula which may present us a considerable number of important facts in portable shape. Now the special group of writers

enerally and particularly as to George Eliot's; advancing ten years, in 1827, Bulwer's Pelham appears, and also the very stimulating Specimens of German Romance, which Thomas Carlyle edited; in 1837 the adorable Pickwick strolls into fiction; in 1847 Thackeray prints Vanity Fair

lwer's gentleman is always given as a very manful and Christian being. I am well aware of the modern tendency to disparage Bulwer, as a slight creature; but with the fresh recollection of his books as they fell upon my own boyhood, I cannot recall a single one which did not leave, as a last residuum, the picture in some sort of the chivalrous gentleman impressed upon my heart. I cheerfully admit that he sometimes came dangerously near snobbery, and t

le whose fiddle compelled every hearer to dance in spite of himself, presently has a great train of people following him, ready to do his bidding in earnestly reforming the prisons, the schools, th

nality of woman to a plane in all respects level with, though properly differentiated from, that of man. It is curious to see the depth of Charlotte Bronte's adoration for Thackeray, the intense, high-pitched woman for the somewhat slack, and as I always think, somewhat low-pitched satirist; and perhaps the essential uttera

Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital-a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of Vanity Fair admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of th

er and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognized; because I regard him as the first social regenerat

noise than that of a snow-flake falling on snow, yet-as I have said, and as I wish now to show with some detail-comes

s that pecu

may at once take the full significance of it, let me remind you of a certain old and grievous situation as between genius and the commonplace person. For a long time every most pi

undred years represents three generations of the whole world; that is t

strous! Here are three thousand millions of people to eat, sleep, die, and rot into oblivion, an

of favoritism, as if he should cry in his lonesome moments, Dear Lord, why hast thou provided so much for me, and so little for yonder multitude? In plain fact, it seems as if there was never such a

ere caste? Is there fate? What becomes of the promise to virtue?... Why are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders, ... and they make war and death sacred; but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is everyday's tragedy." And more to this purport. But nothing could be more unsatisfactory than Emerson's solution of the problem. He unhesitatingly announces on one page

definite form, and at last partial fulfilment in the very beginning of her work. Carlyle is speaking of the rugged trials and apparent impossibilities of living at Craigenputtoch when he and his Jeanie went there, and how bravely and quietly she faced and overcame the poverty, the ugliness, the almost squalor, which was their condition for a long time. "Poverty and mean obstruction continued," he says, "to preside over it, but were transformed by human valor of various sorts into a kind of victory and royalty. Something of high and great dwelt in

Eliot begins to preach the "russet-coated epi

se virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint favorably many years ago. "An ut

had no hair-breadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people-many of them-bear a conscience, and have felt the s

e ordinary tone. In that case, I should have no fear of your not caring to know what further befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the homely details I have to tell at all beneath your attention. As it is, you can, if you please, decline to p

ding and depth-illuminating humor, what creative genius, what manifold forms of living flesh and blood, George Eliot preached the possibility of such moral greatness on the par