“Scenes of Clerical Life,” “Adam Bede,” “The Mill on the Floss,” “Silas Marner,” “Romola,” “Felix Holt,” “The Spanish Gypsy,” “Middlemarch,” “Daniel Deronda,” and “Theophrastus Such.” Her convictions about how she should work were intense. She wrote and _lived_ her story, and once when urged to re-write a tale, replied that she could no more re-write a book than she could live over a year in her own life. Her novels are the embodiment of what she had felt, written that they might strengthen others. The conscientiousness with which she labored made her work sometimes most painful to her. Despondency lest she should fail, fear lest she had misinterpreted a character, depression lest this chapter should fall below a preceding in merit, tortured her in succession, but she worked because she believed she had found her place, and to do her best for mankind was her religion. The slow-growing nature struggling with eager desire for human love, and with a mastering ambition, not often reaches so ripe a stage as did hers. The rigid system of self-culture which she pursued through her life was the outgrowth of her ambition and of her intense interest in things, an interest which we have noticed as being one of the leading elements in her happiness. Reading, study, conversation, observation, writing, travel, were in turns employed in her course of self-discipline. She read incessantly, and _thoroughly_. Notice this list of books, the work of one month, and that when she was nearly fifty years of age: First book of “Lucretius;” sixth book of the “Iliad;” “Samson Agonistes;” Warton’s “History of English Poetry;” “Grote,” second volume; “Marcus Aurelius;” “Vita Nuova,” vol. iv; chapter one of the “Politique Positive;” Guest on “English Rhythms;” Maunce’s “Lectures on Casuistry.” Few months fell below this in reading, and this, too, while she was writing, seeing people, conversing, and suffering, for she had the misfortune to know, as she says, that “one thing is needful: a good digestion.” As a life of earnest purpose, of continued struggle for a high living, of deepest desire to make the most of everything, and for everybody, there is none more marked than that of George Eliot. Non-conformity to the religion and the law in which we believe, must sadden her life for all, but an honest student of her character must, after reading this “Life,” accord to her what she herself never failed to give to the erring—charity. FOOTNOTES [B] George Eliot’s Life, as related in her Letters and Journals. Arranged and edited by her husband, J. W. Cross. In three volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers. ARBOR DAY. BY THE HON. B. G. NORTHROP, LL.D.