near us it evidently did not fulfil preconceived conceptions of a marriage ceremony. He looked at it long, and at last turned disappointed away, audibly muttering, ‘Well, I can’t see anything in it.’ That was evident, but the failure was not in the picture. Preconceived conceptions count for much, whether the artist be a Correggio or a George Eliot, and ignorance and prejudice are ill-fitting spectacles wherewith to assist vision. If it be an axiom that a man should be judged by his peers, we should think that George Eliot would herself prefer that her work should be weighed in the balance by those qualified to hold the scales, and should by them, if at all, be pronounced ‘wanting.’ A book of which Judaism is the acknowledged theme should appeal to Jews for judgment, and thus the question becomes an interesting one to the outer world,--What do the Jews themselves think of _Daniel Deronda_? Are the aspirations of Mordecai regarded by them as the expression of a poet’s dream, or a nation’s hope? What, in short, is the aspect of modern Judaism to the book? ‘Modern’ Judaism is itself, perhaps, a convenient rather than a correct figure of speech. There are modern manners to which modern Jews necessarily conform, and which have a tendency to tone down the outward and special characteristics of Judaism, as of everything else, to a general socially-undistinguishable level. But men are not necessarily dumb because they do not speak much or loudly of such very personal matters as their religious hopes and beliefs, more especially if in these days they are so little in the fashion as to hold strong convictions on such subjects. Our author distinctly formulates the opinion that ‘men may give all due allegiance to a foreign State without ceasing to belong to their own people’ (p. 21); and in the same sense as we may conceive a man honestly fulfilling all dues as good husband and good father to his living and lawful wife and children, and yet holding tenderly in the unguessed-at depths of memory some long-ago-lost love, so is it conceivable of many an unromantic-looking nineteenth century Jew, who soberly performs all good citizen duties, that the unspoken name of Jerusalem is still enshrined in like unguessed-at depths, as the ‘perfection of beauty,’ ‘the joy of the whole earth.’ Conventionalities conduce to silence on such topics, and therefore it is to published rather than to spoken Jewish criticisms we must turn in our inquiry, and the little book under review certainly helps us to a definite answer.