Passing by, therefore, the absurdity of the statement that the proper office of the novelist is to amuse, and that when George Eliot pretended to do more, and to instruct, she necessarily failed to do either; it is almost as odd to find that the very objectors who urge the injurious effect of George Eliot's moral purpose upon her work are people who swear by Richardson and Fielding, utterly forgetting that if moral purpose is a detriment to _Daniel Deronda_, it is simply destruction to _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Tom Jones_. And lastly upon this point, when I think of the crude and hasty criticism which confines this moral purpose in _Daniel Deronda_ to the pushing forward of Deronda's so-called religious patriotism in endeavoring to re-establish his people in the ancient seat of the Hebrews,--a view which I call crude and hasty because it completely loses sight of the much more prominent and important moral purpose of the book, namely, the setting forth of Gwendolen Harleth's repentance; when, I say, I hear these critics not only assume that Deronda's mission is _the_ moral purpose of this book, but even belittle that by declaring that George Eliot's enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of the Jews must have been due to a chance personal acquaintance of hers with some fervid Jew who led her off into these chimerical fancies; and when, I find this tone prevailing not only with the Philistines, but among a great part of George Eliot's otherwise friends and lovers: then I am in a state of amazement which precludes anything like critical judgment on my part. As for me, no Jew--not even the poorest shambling clothes-dealer in Harrison street--but startles me effectually out of this work-a-day world: when I look upon the face of a Jew, I seem to receive a message which has come under the whole sea of time from the further shore of it: this wandering person, who without a home in any nation has yet made a literature which is at home in every nation, carries me in one direction to my mysterious brethren, the cavemen and the lake dwellers, in the other direction to the carpenter of Bethlehem, climax of our race. And now, to gather together these people from the four ends of the earth, to rehabilitate them in their thousand-fold consecrated home after so many ages of wandering, to re-make them into a homologous nation at once the newest and the oldest upon the earth, to endow the 19th Century with that prodigious momentum which all the old Jewish fervor and spirituality and tenacity would acquire in the backward spring from such long ages of restraint and oppression, and with the mighty accumulation of cosmopolitan experiences; the bare suggestion would seem enough to stir the blood of the most ungentle Gentile. But I must hasten to complete the account of George Eliot's personal existence which we suspended at the point where she had come to London in 1851.