eye, the voice, now soft as the low notes of a flute, now clear and stirring as the call of the light infantry bugle, of him who stood there Sunday after Sunday, witnessing and pleading for his Lord, the king of righteousness and love and glory, with whose spirit he was filled, and in whose power he spoke. The long lines of young faces rising tier above tier down the whole length of the chapel, from the little boy's who had just left his mother to the young man's who was going out next week into the great world rejoicing in his strength. It was a great and solemn sight, and never more so than at this time of year, when the lights in the chapel were in the pulpit and at the seats of the præpostors of the week, and the soft twilight stole over the rest of the chapel, deepening into darkness in the high gallery behind the organ." Then he goes on to enquire, "what was it after all which seized and held these three hundred boys, dragging them out of themselves, willing or unwilling, for twenty minutes on Sunday afternoon?" . . . What was it that moved and held us, the rest of the three hundred reckless, childish boys, who feared the Doctor with all our hearts, and very little besides in heaven or earth; who thought more of our sets in the school than of the church of Christ, and put the traditions of Rugby and the public opinions of boys in our daily life above the laws of God?" The explanation is too long to quote, but, perhaps you will remember, it is to the effect that though his hearers might not follow or fully enter into the preacher's meaning, they were conscious of listening to a "warm living voice," and "to a man who we felt to be with all his heart and soul and strength striving against whatever was mean and unmanly and unrighteous in our little world." Those upon whom his influence was most strongly impressed, came to regard him as the courageous captain of their souls, and were made "to believe, first in him, and then in his Master."

Turning now to that volume of sermons which, from sources like these, had acquired a peculiar interest, let me

say that with the subject matter of them it is not within my province to deal. Going through them you are conscious of the truth of all that Thomas Hughes and Dean Stanley have said of their earnestness and power, of the gracefulness of the language charged with fervour, and marked with a fine simplicity, their peculiar adaptation to the circumstances in which they were delivered, and to the congregation of boys who listened to them. There are two, however, which call for brief reference, the first and the last. Among the sermons that Tom Brown listened to there was one which, to him, was invested with a peculiar solemnity. It was on the occasion of a death in the School. Some of the Doctor's words are quoted in a lengthy paragraph, and we are told how, among all the sermons he had preached to them, he had never spoken words which had sank deeper than some of those in this one. The opening discourse in the volume under consideration is on "Sudden Death," and has reference to an event of that kind which had occurred in the School. The last one is described as "The Farewell Warning," and was preached on June 5th, 1842, before the breaking up of the School. On the following Sunday, the day before the forty-seventh anniversary of his birthday, the preacher died suddenly, in circumstances of which Dean Stanley has given us the pathetic details, and in a few days later he was laid to rest in the chancel of Rugby Chapel, immediately under the Communion Table.

You will perhaps remember how the news of that unlooked-for event came to Tom Brown while he was with a fishing party in the North of Scotland, and how he at once left his companions and made his way with all the haste possible to Rugby, how, having reached there he went to the old School and gained access to the Chapel, and how, alone in the softened evening light, he sat himself down, first in the seat which he had last occupied as a sixth-form boy, then moving himself away to the lowest bench and to the seat which he had occupied on his first Sunday at

Rugby, and finally how he walked up the steps to the altar, and knelt there with bowed head and tearful eyes. Says he who tells the story, "Here let us leave him-where better could we leave him, than at the altar, before which he had first caught a glimpse of the glory of his birthright, and felt the drawing of the bond which links all living souls together in one brotherhood-at the grave beneath the altar of Him, who had opened his eyes to see that glory and softened his heart till it could feel that bond?"

Fifteen years later, on an autumn evening, there came another pilgrim to the same shrine. It was Matthew Arnold, bound to the preacher by filial ties, who, in his poem on "Rugby Chapel," has given us the record of that visit in meditative verse, in which-along with the pathetic expression of his own sorrowful sense of loss he pays a noble tribute to the singleness of purpose, the high courage, and the unwearied zeal of him, who as a shepherd of souls, had laboured in that fold and found there his earthly resting place. Speculating on the possible continuity of that strenuous life in another sphere, he says:

O strong soul, by what shore

Tarriest thou now? For that force,
Surely, has not been left vain!
Somewhere, surely afar,

In the sounding labour-house vast
Of being, is practised that strength,
Zealous, beneficent, firm!

The lines remind one of some others, equally applicable, in "In Memoriam," wherein Tennyson, dealing with the same conditions of sorrow and hope, says confidently of his dead friend:

And, doubtless, unto thee is given

A life that bears immortal fruit
In those great offices that suit
The full-grown energies of heaven.

WHEN George Eliot was busy writing in the fifties,

sixties, and seventies of last century, she was hailed as one of the greatest novelists that England had produced. The booksellers to-day state that her popularity has waned; that her works are not now selling as readily as they did, and that it is not good business to keep them in stock. Accepting this as fact, we ask: Has there been a declension in the public taste since those earlier days? Or is there something in the works themselves to produce this damping down of popular favour?

Both questions, it appears to me, may be answered in the affirmative. But the reasons of the vicissitudes of popular judgment are not readily explainable in a paragraph. George Eliot is not always easy reading. To get the full significance of her writings she has often to be conned more than once. She is not to be read whilst running. This does not suit present-day novel readers, however it may have been with her contemporaries. They like their excitement served up without philosophical garnishings. The bulk of readers-certainly of readers of fiction-now, are more superficial than those of forty or fifty years ago; an anomaly hardly to be expected, and rather surprising, when the vast annual expenditure on educational work is considered. It is the fact nevertheless, and it does not speak well for the educational results of to-day that she should have fallen into disfavour.

Again, her metaphysical and psychological disquisitions

are too much for your ordinary reader. If she had been shallower or more superficial she would have been more popular. She is skilled in the deep secrets of the human heart, and is often abstruse when dealing with even ordinary sensations and incidents. Many of her sentences are so obscure as to be tantalizing. Read and re-read them -even the most quick-witted reader is greatly in the dark as to their full signification. Her ingenious expositions are often far above the head of the ordinary man or woman, and to those of higher intelligence they are not always clear.

Further, many of her references are caviare to the general. She goes out of her way to revel in the obscure, both in history and philosophy. This is an affectation that cultured readers, not less than the unlettered, resent. It is one of the evidences of her intellectual femininity which had best been spared. No one cares to read a novel, or a popular essay, with an encyclopædia at one's elbow. But she has an anticipatory answer to this, as to most criticisms, when she remarks: "Those who take in a larger sweep than their neighbours are apt to seem mightily vain and affected." George Eliot is not to be caught napping! But the "larger sweep" might well have its limits; and the most sympathetic admirer is apt to fling down the book and exclaim (with Jeffrey on a memorable occasionand perhaps as short-sightedly): "This will never do!

There is plenty of genius but (shall I say) a lack of geniality in her books. Reading novels for amusement is characteristic of the majority of even persons of more than average intelligence, and they do not care to be called on for the effort of studiously thinking as they read; so that in the meantime the influence she wielded at the outset has waned. Popular, then, in the sense of appealing to the mass of readers she certainly is not. But this is only for a season. The readers who know her not will be a

"Daniel Deronda," ch. xxxix.