her father or suffer any affection to interfere with that which she felt for him. The love felt for her by Rutherford is instinctively contrasted by the reader with the emotion, the rush of welling feeling which he afterwards feels for Theresa; and incidentally, although there are probably not more than two or three pages concerning these two women, their temperaments stand revealed with surprising clearness. (We cannot forgive the author for allowing Theresa to slip out of Rutherford's life. We cannot help feeling that her individuality, her noble courage, and a certain rich vigour that emanates from her when she speaks, would have given to his life a colour and fulness and richness which the woman he afterwards marries, whom he loves so devotedly, as she loves him, nevertheless lacked. In every book from the hand of this writer we find portraits of women of the same strong striking order. Scarcely any details are given of them. Yet, so far as my own tolerably extensive acquaintanceship with English fiction goes, there is nothing resembling them. I am never quite sure whether they rightly belong to the English type of character. They remind me, though they are in no sense imitative, of Turgenief's gallery of Russian women, essentially modern -one cannot conceive of either Raphael or Shakespeare painting Irene in Smoke or Miriam in Miriam's Schooling; yet though they are the children of the nineteenth century, they are closer akin to the woman of Shakespeare than, for example, they are to the artificial feminine products (with the exception of Lucy Feverel and Dahlia Fleming) of Mr. Meredith's imagination. Neither Miriam nor Theresa nor Pauline of The Revolution in Tanner's Lane, ever uttered an epigram in her life. And they interest us precisely as Shakespeare's women interest us, in and through and eventually because of their womanhood, in what they hope, feel, and love. What views Theresa held on the unimportant question of "Women's Suffrage" I know not, nor in the smallest degree care. Whether she could have loved Rutherford, whether she actually did love him are matters of the deepest interest to me. It may be that Rutherford's wife, who redeemed his life from utter loneliness and wretchedness and consoled it and even made it enjoyable, fulfilled some want in his nature, as no other woman could have done. The love of Rutherford for his wife and step-child, and his friendship for McKay, a journalist, are constantly dwelt upon in the latter part of his career, which is recorded in the Deliverance, and would alone serve to refute the charge of "pessimism." So far from there being any truth in this, the value of these books is mainly in bringing consciously before us, that if we are no longer able to hold the old faiths and hopes that gave beauty and

meaning and sacredness to the lives of those that have gone before, we have nevertheless gained; and amidst our gains are the drawing closer of the bonds of brotherhood, and the enlarging of our ideas and sympathies. Above all, there is compensation in the wretchedest lot given by the love between man and woman, and of all that is denoted by this dearest of earthly relationships. Rutherford remains wretchedly poor after his marriage, and he is obliged to take the ill-paid occupation of a clerk and submit to all the sordid misery of that form of modern slavery. The description of his occupation, of the men who are his companions in this labour, of all forms the most deadening, and of the attempt which he and his friend McKay make to bring some sort of civilisation and humanity into Drury Lane, are depicted with an intensity of spiritual insight that justifies the belief that the Deliverance, like the Autobiography, is largely self-revelation. The sort of lay mission in Drury Lane gives the opportunity for those masterly studies of character in which this writer excels.

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What, then, did they teach? What was their aim? It is worth inquiring, for it was through this Mission that Rutherford found peace and even joy and something of a solution to the problems which the modern man who thinks and feels can no more escape than Job did. Our main object," he tells us, was to create in our hearers contentment with their lot, and even some joy in it. That was our religon; that was the central thought of all we said and did, giving shape and tenderness to everything." The chapter in which these words occur, from which the quotation that follows is taken, is the keynote of the book, the soul's interpretation and achievement.) It may be set beside that chapter in Sartor Resartus called "The Everlasting Yea." It is no mighty symphony of triumphant Hope. Still less is it a juggling with words, a thinly-veiled compromise. It is the utterance of a spirit that has sought Truth to the uttermost dpeths upon the issues of most vital import to human nature. The noble passage quoted below sums up this philosophy-or religion is, perhaps, the truer word.

For my own part, I was happy when I had struck that path. I felt as if somehow, after many errors, I had once more gained a road, a religion, in fact, and one which essentially was not new but old, the religion of the Reconciliation, the reconciliation of man with God; differing from the current creed in so far as I did not lay stress upon sin as the cause of estrangement, but yet agreeing with it in making it my duty of duties to suppress revolt and to submit calmly and sometimes cheerfully to the Creator. This surely, under a thousand disguises, has been the meaning of all the forms of worship which we have seen in the world. Pain and death are nothing new, and men have been driven into perplexed scepticism and even insurrection by

them, ever since men came into being. Always, however, have the majority, the vast majority of the race, felt instinctively that in this scepticism and insurrection they could not abide, and they have struggled more or less blindly after explanation. . . . I cannot too earnestly insist upon the need of our holding, each man for himself, by some faith which shall anchor him. It must not be taken up by chance. We must fight for it, for only so will it become our faith. The halt in indifference or in hostility is easy enough and seductive enough. The half-hearted thinks that when he has attained that stage he has completed the term of human wisdom. I say go on; do not stay there; do not take it for granted that there is nothing beyond; incessantly attempt an advance, and at last a light, dim it may be, will arise. No theory of the world is possible. The storm, the rain slowly rotting the harvest, children sickening in cellars are obvious; but equally obvious are an evening in June, the delight of men and women in one another, in music, and in the exercise of thought. There can surely be no question that the sum of satisfaction is increasing, not merely in the gross but for each human being, as the earth from which we sprang is being worked out of the race, and a higher type is being developed. . . . Nature is Rhadamanthine, and more so, for she visits the sins of the fathers upon the children; but there is in her also an infinite Pity, healing all wounds, softening all calamities, ever hastening to alleviate and repair. Christianity in strange historical fashion is an expression of nature, a projection of her into a biography and a creed.

What, it may be asked, and has been asked in a religious paper with an accent that is almost hostile, after all this travail and anguish of soul, Mark Rutherford comes back to the old copy-book maxims that we all of us hold for the most part and throw over without any great agony of spirit when it suits us? He accepts, as we have always tacitly accepted, the Law of the Gospel and the Prophets and the rest. Why not have accepted them in the beginning? The answer, of course, is that every age has its martyrs, no less than its apostles. And the Truth they have sought, and the ground they have won, must be ever again sought and re-won by those that come after with kindred souls. And to such, maybe obscure and insignificant, whose inarticulate suspiria de profundis none have known, these books will give interpretation and consolation and strength as do few others.

There is one more interesting fact to be noted in connection with the two books upon which I have dwelt. They are most precious additions to a class of literature in which France, with her long list of Confessions by Alfred de Musset, Senancour, Amiel, Maurice de Guerin, Lammenais, and others, is exceedingly rich; our own contributions being mainly represented by Mill's Autobiography and John Inglesant.

Although the books referred to above have a profounder philosophical interest than those which followed from this writer's pen, the average thoughtful reader will probably prefer Miriam's Schooling above the others. It is less fragmentary than the earlier

ones, more coherent, more rounded. It is a study of singular vividness and sympathy of a young girl passionate, inexperienced, and impulsive, filled with chaotic ideas and instincts, and, when the story starts, undisciplined and unschooled. From the very first moment that we are introduced to her beneath her wayward exterior we get a glimpse of the fire and light that are at the centre of Miriam's soul, and that often fitful, and, once at least, nearly extinguished, are at last animated into something steadier and more abiding. But Miriam, as we first see her, is a big black-haired, dark-eyed girl, whose handsome, regular, and slightly freckled face no more resembles that of her dead mother or of her father, a watchmaker in the village of Cowfold, than do her qualities, habits, or temperament. In the first half-dozen pages of the book, in one of those apparently commonplace discussions which reveal people's essential nature more strikingly and truly than do their sentiments on more important subjects, we are given a glimpse of the forces, strong and irregular, that are at work within Miriam's mind, and something also of that originality-not so much of thought as of attitude-which lifts her above the small commonplace conventional prison-house in which most of us are bound.

Miriam resolves to help a saddler, one Cutts, under suspicion of arson, and she decides on the following day to go to the solicitors who are defending him. This involves a walk of six miles, and it also involves a question of ethics, the settlement of which in her answer to the solicitor at once makes her character, or at least the driving power behind her life, intelligible to us. The solicitor asks her whether she had seen Cutts on the night of the fire, and when she says "Yes," she had met him in the street, he asks her what time this was, reminding her that the fire had broke out at a quarter to eight. Realising the importance of her answer, and untroubled by a memory of the copy-book maxims instilled into most of us with regard to the paramount necessity of truthfulness, just as she is unaffected by any higher religious or ethical obligations, Miriam deliberately states what she knows to be untrue. Her deliberate lying to save Cutts, who is almost a stranger to her, springs wholly from the altruistic desire to help a man who is being hunted down and in danger, and who is infinitely less guilty, she thinks, than fraudulent contractors. An almost similar psychological situation, it will be remembered, occurs in The Heart of Midlothian, when Jeanie Deans, that "triumph of culture," cannot even lie to save her sister's life. Yet Miriam's character is as fearless, instinctively truthful, and direct as Jeanie Deans', but her veracity rested on no principle; it was not the product of a carefully planned system of religion that had at last become so strong as to be capable of dominating

the strongest instinctive sentiments. When Miriam's father marries again, notwithstanding the affection that existed between them, there are disagreeable scenes, and at last it is decided that Miriam and her brother Andrew shall go to London. Andrew is to become a clerk to his uncle, Mr. Dabb, who is a provision dealer in the Borough, and Miriam, overjoyed at the thought of freedom and novelty and the wider world of London, is to keep house for him.

They take some rooms in Nelson Square, and almost from the first the note of tragedy is struck. Andrew, a weak young man, without much intelligence, who had led a wholesome country life, with football and cricket for pleasures, rapidly deteriorates under the wear and tear of London life, and to relieve the unhealthy exhaustion which he is conscious of without knowing the causes, takes to stimulants. Miriam, wayward and careless, soon becomes wholly absorbed in a new and passionate interest. She makes the acquaintance of a young man, the son of a clergyman, who, after drifting from one occupation to another, having had no special training, is delighting music-hall audiences with his comic songs at the moment when he becomes acquainted with Miriam. Montgomery, for such was his name, had not altogether lost his finer instincts, and Miriam's beauty and freshness greatly attract him. But the life he leads, the type of women he is in the habit of meeting, one of the inevitable results of which is an incapacity for intercourse of a purer kind with nobler women, and the general deterioration which follows the constant resort to stimulants, disqualified him from understanding such a woman as Miriam, with her innate, proud purity of soul and body and her passionate desires, of which she speaks with a frankness and unconventionality that puzzle him. Andrew loses his work, is incapable of keeping from drinking, and one night—a night when Miriam, having been by herself to the music hall, has waited for Montgomery, walked home with him, and with difficulty escaped from his efforts to make her enter his lodgings-is found by her lying senseless on the floor, with his head cut open. The page in which this scene is depicted is masterly beyond expression. Andrew, only a few months earlier a blameless, well-intentioned youth, lies there unconscious, pleading for pity; he might be dying for aught she knew, and Miriam, who also only a few months earlier had walked six miles to save a kindly man from disaster, is disturbed only so far as her brother's death might interfere with herself. Is it the same Miriam? It is the same Miriam, no longer driven hither and thither by impulses, but mastered by one overpowering passion. Montgomery has set her soul alight.