possible as a marriage between a Gwendolen Harleth and a Grandcourt; this was enough to irritate even the thickest-skinned Philistine, and this George Eliot's book showed with a terrible conclusiveness. Yet the showing was made so daintily and with so light a hand that, as I have said, current society did not know, and has not yet recognized where or how the wound was. We have all read of the miraculous sword in the German fable whose blade was so keen that when, upon a certain occasion, its owner smote a warrior with it from crown to saddle, the warrior nevertheless rode home and was scarcely aware he had been wounded until, upon his wife opening the door, he attempted to embrace her and fell into two pieces. Now, as I said, just as _Daniel Deronda_ made people feel uncomfortable by even vaguely revealing a sharp truth--so, a prig, so far as I can make out, is a person whose goodness is so genuine, essential and ever-present that all ungenuine people have a certain sense of discomfort when brought in contact with it. If the prig-hater be questioned he will not deny the real goodness of the _Daniel Deronda_ people; he dare not--no one in this age dare--to wish explicitly that Mirah and Daniel Deronda might be less good; but as nearly as anything definite can be obtained what he desires is that the prig should be good in some oily and lubricative way so as not to jar the nerves of those who are less good. Conform, conform! seems to be the essential cry of the prig-haters; if you go to an evening party you wear your dress coat and look like every other man; but if your goodness amounts to a hump, a deformity, we do not ask you to cut it off, but at least pad it; if every one grows as big as you we shall have to enlarge all our drawing-rooms and society will be disorganized. In short, the cry against the prig turns out to be nothing more than the old claim for conformity and the conventional. For one, I never hear these admonitions to conformity without recalling a comical passage of Tom Hood's in which the fellows of a Zoological society propose to remedy the natural defects of animal morphology, such as the humps of dromedaries and the overgrowth of hair upon lions so as to bring all the grotesqueness of the animal creation into more conformity with conventional ideas of proportion. The passage occurs in a pretended report from the keeper of the animals to the President of the society. After describing the condition of the various beasts the keeper proceeds: