De Quincey, “I must insist on your telling me what is the moral of a rattlesnake, or the moral of Niagara. I suppose the moral is, that you must get out of their way if you mean to moralize much longer.” But this light-hearted flippancy on the part of the critic was only possible, or at least was only acceptable, in those days when the novelist had not yet awakened to his serious duties in life. Content, for the most part, to tell a story, he barely remembered now and then, in the beginning, may be, or at the end, that there was such a thing as an ethical purpose in existence. Even Richardson, the father of English didactic fiction, was but an indifferent parent, starting out with a great many gallant promises on behalf of his offspring, and easily forgetting all about them. Miss Burney was as cheerfully unconscious of her own grave obligations to society as was Miss Austen; while in those few lines with which Sir Walter Scott closes “The Heart of Mid-Lothian”--lines addressed to the “reader,” and containing some irrefutable but not very original remarks about the happiness of virtue and the infelicity of vice--we see an almost pathetic avowal on the part of the great novelist that, in the mere delight of telling his beautiful and best loved tale, he had well-nigh lost sight of any moral lesson it might be fitted to convey, and was trying at the last moment to make amends for this deficiency. Imagine George Eliot forgetting, or permitting her readers to forget, the moral lesson of “Adam Bede,” when every fresh development of character or of narrative has for its conscious purpose the driving home of hard and bitter truths. No need for the authoress of “Romola” to wind up her story with that paragraph of excellent advice to poor little Lillo, who is after all rather young to profit 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.