held it should not have endeavored to prevent an authoress greater than Miss Austen, and far more directly under his influence than Charlotte Bronté, from sinking, in one or two instances, into faults which neither Miss Austen nor Miss Bronté would ever have committed. Many things are strange about this literary and domestic companionship; this comparatively trifling fact seems to me not the least strange. Finally let me say that I fully expect George Eliot yet to give to the world some work of art even greater than any she has already produced. She is not a woman to close with even a comparative failure. Her maxim, I feel confident, would be that of the Emperor Napoleon--offer terms of peace and repose after a great victory; never otherwise. GEORGE SAND. We are all of us probably inclined now and then to waste a little time in vaguely speculating on what might have happened if this or that particular event had not given a special direction to the career of some great man or woman. If there had been an inch of difference in the size of Cleopatra's nose; if Hannibal had not lingered at Capua; if Cromwell had carried out his idea of emigration; if Napoleon Bonaparte had taken service under the Turk--and so on through all the old familiar illustrations dear to the minor essayist and the debating society. I have sometimes felt tempted thus to lose myself in speculating on what might have happened if the woman whom all the world knows as George Sand had been happily married in her youth to the husband of her choice. Would she ever have taken to literature at all? Would she, loving as she does, and as Frenchwomen so rarely do, the changing face of inanimate nature--the fields, the flowers, and the brooks--have lived a peaceful and obscure life in some happy country place, and been content with home, and family, and love, and never thought of fame? Or if, thus happily married, she still had allowed her genius to find an expression in literature, would she have written books with no passionate purpose in them--books which might have seemed like those of a good Miss Mulock made perfect--books which Podsnap might have read with approval and put without a scruple into the hands of that modest young person, his daughter? Certainly one cannot but think that a different kind of early life would have given a quite different complexion to the literary individuality of George Sand.