which had for years stood filled with rain-water near his house, becomes dry, and on the bottom is revealed a skeleton with a leathern bag of gold in each hand. The young man plunging out into the dark, laden with his treasure, had fallen in and lain for all these years to be afterwards brought to light as another phase of the frequent identity between death and gold. Here, too, one is obliged to remember those doubly dreadful words in _Romeo and Juliet_, where Romeo having with difficulty bought poison from the apothecary, cries: "There is thy gold; worse poison to men's souls, Doing more murder in this loathsome world Than these poor compounds which thou mayst not sell. I sell thee poison, thou hast sold me none. Farewell; buy food and get thyself in flesh." I must also instance one little passing picture in _Silas Marner_ which though extremely fanciful, is yet, a charming type of some of the greatest and most characteristic work that George Eliot has done. Silas Marner had been a religious enthusiast of an obscure sect of a small manufacturing town of England; suddenly a false accusation of theft in which the circumstantial evidence was strong against him brings him into disgrace among his fellow-disciples. With his whole faith in God and man shattered he leaves his town, wanders over to the village of Raveloe, begins aimlessly to pursue his trade of weaving, presently is paid for some work in gold; in handling the coin he is smit with the fascination of its yellow radiance, and presently we find him pouring out all the prodigious intensity of his nature, which had previously found a fitter field in religion, in the miser's passion. Working day and night while yet a young man he fills his two leathern bags with gold; and George Eliot gives us some vivid pictures of how, when his day's work would be done, he would brighten up the fire in his stone hut which stood at the edge of the village, eagerly lift up the particular brick of the stone floor under which he kept his treasure concealed, pour out the bright yellow heaps of coin and run his long white fingers through them with all the miser's ecstasy. But after he is robbed the utter blank in his soul--and one can imagine such a blank in such a soul, for he was essentially religious--becomes strangely filled. One day a poor woman leading her little golden-haired child is making her way along the road past Marner's cottage; she is the wife, by private marriage, of the Squire's eldest son, and after having been cruelly treated by him for years has now desperately resolved to appear with her child at a great merry-making which goes on at the Squire's to-day, there to expose all and demand justice. It so happens however that in her troubles she has become an opium-taker; just as she is passing Marner's cottage the effect of an unusually large dose becomes overpowering; she lies down and falls off into a stupor which this time ends in death. Meantime