Early in the nineteenth century George Eliot draws the hero of her first great novel (_Adam Bede_) in the act of picking a quarrel with a rival for a woman’s love. She shows jealousy in him springing chiefly from a sense of property in Hetty. The wounded pride and self-importance of a too despotic nature finds relief in fighting Arthur Donnithorne. In _Middlemarch_ the transition to a higher stage of evolution is marked. She gives us there a graphic picture of a woman wrestling with jealousy in the secrecy of her own chamber, and correctly places in the tenderly emotional nature of that sex the primary impulse to subdue the vile passion. Female jealousy made no appeal to arms, but in a thousand subtle ways it was sending forth currents of anti-social force, and without a widespread feminine repudiation of jealousy no clear advance to higher social life was possible. Dorothea is a true type of progressing womanhood. She gains a victory in the noble warfare we see her waging inwardly, and, rising far above the vile passion, she goes forth to her rival in a glow of generous emotion that not only compels the confidence of the latter, but for the time draws that selfish, narrow nature up to the level of her own. There is no false note in this picture, and if we glance at the transcript of real life at the period we may easily find its counterpart. The well-known writer, Mrs. Jamieson (in her _Commonplace Book_) relates: “I was not more than six years old when I suffered, from the fear of not being loved, and from the idea that another was preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me! Whether those around me regarded it as a fit of ill-temper or a fit of illness I do not know. I could not then have given a name to the pang that fevered me, but I never forgot that suffering. It left a deep impression, and the recollection was so far salutary that in after life I guarded myself against the approaches of that hateful, deformed, agonizing thing which men call jealousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has saved me from the demoralizing effects of the passion, by a wholesome terror and even a sort of disgust.” The knell of a departing phase of inner life was sounding when womanhood acquired the power to sift evidence from childish recollections, to detect the utter uselessness of the suffering jealousy creates and the ignominy of allowing it to become a cause of suffering at all. Mrs. Jamieson stands on the threshold of a new era, for critical intellect here enters the sphere of the emotions, and these, yielding to guidance and control, human reason is henceforth a prime factor in emotional evolution. But further, sympathy when developed to a certain point inevitably leads men astray if not guided by reason. Let me here relate a sequence of events that occurred in my own experience.