by it; while we who have followed Tito from his first joyous entrance into Florence to that last dreadful moment when, floating, bruised, beautiful, and helpless, down the Arno, he opens his dying eyes to meet the horror of Baldassarre's vengeance,—we surely do not require to be warned afresh against the unpardonable sin of making things easy for ourselves. In the pathetic history of the marred and broken lives of "Middlemarch," in the darker and harsher tragedy of "Daniel Deronda," we see forever present upon each succeeding page the underlying motive of the tale; we hear George Eliot listening, as Morley says, to the sound of her own voice, and announcing as distinctly as she announced in life that her function is that of the æsthetic teacher, to rouse the nobler emotions which make mankind desire the social right.
If the test of the true artist be to conceal his art, then this transparently didactic purpose is fatal to the perfection of any work claiming to spring from the imagination. It is impossible to preach a sermon out of the mouth of fiction without making the fiction subordinate to the sermon, and thus at once
