great English writers of fiction. She did not begin her novel work until late in life, and consequently combines freshness with range and experience. The earlier works are perhaps the best; towards the close of her career she inclined too much in the direction of Purpose. The groups of a recent critic afford a satisfactory view of her work. First, from 1857-61, including Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner; second, the single novel Romola, 1863; third, from 1866-80, including Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The first group is marked by a combination of good qualities such as are not found in those which follow. Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss have a pleasant lightness of touch, an ease and grace that do not survive in the later work. They show the reserve strength of one who selects from well-organized material. "The accumulated experiences of her long and passive youth were now poured out with a fortunate result." By and by, however, the spontaneity and humor shown in these books is clouded by a spirit of thoughtfulness.

George Eliot began to take herself too seriously. She went to Italy in 1860 and wrote Romola three years later for the especial utilization of that experience. The period of Romola is the Italian Renaissance, and some have termed it a marvellous picture of Florentine life during the fifteenth century. But it smells of the lamp; the mere fact that she had spent only six weeks in Florence before writing it, gives

the book too much the character of a tour de force. And her latest novels are tinged by philosophy and by the desire to effect reforms, and novels for a purpose traduce the requirements of real art. Thus into Daniel Deronda comes the fatal defect of heaviness. It cannot support the weight of its inwrought didactic passages. Yet Middlemarch shows all the good points of her first novels, though even here there is a needless burden of philosophy. Her last work was a collection of essays called The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879); they are labored, and are marred by her tendency to receive the conclusions of philosophy for absolute truth. George Eliot will always command respect and a measure of love. Her position is a high one. But most readers will hesitate to place her-as she has been placed-by the side of Scott and Thackeray.

Next in order comes CHARLES KINGSLEY, who wrote some exquisite poetry beside his fine prose. He was a clergyman in the Church of England, born 1819 in Devonshire, where from his cradle he breathed the sea air. Educated at King's College, London, and at Cambridge, in 1860 he was made Professor of Modern History at Cambridge-a position which he held for nine years. His other honors were ecclesiastical. He was keenly alive to contemporary movements, and in two novels written in 1848-50 (Alton Locke and Yeast) he embalms in memorable setting some of the troubles of the working class, the difficulties of agricultural labor and

of labor in large cities. His zealous-though generous-partisanship led him into a theological controversy with Cardinal Newman in 1864. Newman (not Cardinal then, by the way) was master of an admirable style and a most logical gift of reasoning; Kingsley was very weak in argument and got the worst of a discussion which caused intense interest at the time. Kingsley died in 1875.

His work covered a wide range of subject. He began as a poet but with rare self-knowledge, finding that this was not his most suitable medium, he thrust all his energy to prose. But the little poetry he did was for the most part exceedingly beautiful. Most of it appeared before 1858; but some of his books written after that date contain lovely snatches of verse. The lines beginning "When all the world is young, lad," are a good example:

When all the world is young, lad,

And all the trees are green;

And every goose a swan, lad,

And every lass a queen;

Then hey for boot and horse, lad,

And round the world away:

Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.

When all the world is old, lad,

And all the trees are brown;

And all the sport is stale, lad,

And all the wheels run down,

Creep home and take your place there,
The spent and maimed among:

God grant you find one face there

You loved when all was young.

His prose embraced such professional work as sermons and the lectures delivered at Cambridge, besides the novels which gave him rank in literature. After Yeast came Hypatia, the scene of which is laid in the Alexandria of the fifth century. It is interesting but a little heavy. Undoubtedly Kingsley is seen at his highest in Westward Ho! 1855. This spirited romance takes us back to Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada. Drake, Hawkins and other worthies appear in its pages. Kingsley is especially happy at sea or on the wide moors, and the well-known scenery of Devon gives him opportunity for some powerful bits of description. Westward Ho! is thorough and consistent and well constructed. An idea of its style may be gained from the following passage:

"So they went on to the point, where the cyclopean wall of granite cliff... ends sheer in a precipice of some three hundred feet, topped by a pile of snow-white rock, bespangled with golden lichens.

It was a glorious sight upon a glorious day. To the northward the glens rushed down toward the cliff, crowned with gray crags, and carpeted with purple heather and green fern; and from their feet stretched away to the westward the sapphire rollers of the vast Atlantic, crowned with a thousand crests of flying foam. On their left hand, some ten miles to the north, stood out against the sky the purple wall of Hartland Cliffs, sinking lower and lower, as they trended away to the southward along the lonely iron-bound shores of Cornwall, until they faded, dim and blue into the blue horizon forty miles away.

"The sky was flecked with clouds which rushed towards them fast upon the roaring southwest wind; and the warm ocean breeze swept up the cliffs and whistled through the heather bells, and howled in cranny and crag."

Another historical romance followed in 1866Hereward the Wake, the action of which falls about the Norman Conquest. While not in the class of its predecessor, it has the good qualities of strength and vividness. The Water Babies, of 1863, shows Kingsley in a quite unique light. The book is a sort of fairy-tale containing touches of satire and touches of pure nonsense, but charmingly written.

With Charles may be taken his brother HENRY KINGSLEY, eleven years younger and the author of at least one excellent novel. He was an Oxford man and led a wandering life, spending a number of years in Australia. The knowledge thus acquired he used with good effect in various novels. He died the year after his brother, and his personality was as pleasant, as may be judged from the geniality of his books. Of these, Geoffrey Hamlin and Ravenshoe are best known. The former was an outcome of his Australian life; in the latter, what plot it does possess hinges on the then Crimean War. Its author was not strong on plots; but Ravenshoe is a book to which one willingly returns.

The value of strict attention to business is well shown in the case of ANTHONY TROLLOPE (18151882). He inherited the literary spirit, and during