Church-rates has gone; Church-rates remain. No parson was to be punished for not wearing the dress, nor yet for wearing it. Without pressing the argument too far I may observe that between the accession of Elizabeth and the Commonwealth there is direct evidence that the use of copes was in excess of the compulsion of the Advertisements in cases where no Church-rate came in to condition the acquisition of the dress, namely, in Chapels Royal and the Chapels of Colleges and Bishops' palaces, namely in sacella, which the most loose use of language could not include under Collegiate Churches.' In one case— Lincoln College, Oxford-the copes were given by that well-known Low Churchman Archbishop Williams, as visitor of the college when Bishop of Lincoln. Does not the reading of the Advertisements which I offer, straightforward and grammatical as it is, simplify a tangled episode in our Church history, an episode more than 300 years old, and still going on? If it can be accepted, there will be no need to settle the comparative force of Rubric and of Advertisement and Canon, because there will be no longer any fundamental contrariety between them. The regal sanction to the Advertisements may be received or may be rejected; and reading into will be a very harmless phrase when the thing read in is in fact identical with that into which it is read. One class of provisions will express the hard absolute law as it is written, and the other the popular explanation of that law as it may be worked. The objection that in Tudor or Stuart days such a thing as ritual permission or elasticity was unknown is at once refuted by facts over which there is no dispute, and which, like the vestiary question, are connected with the Prayer Book and Canons. Every successive Prayer Book enjoins daily prayers on every minister, and yet the use of them in the vast majority of parish churches has been continuously disregarded. But there is a still stronger evidence. The Canons of 1604 (Canons 14 and 15) actually order service upon such days as are appointed to be kept holy by the Book of Common Prayer and upon their eves,' besides prescribing the Wednesday and Friday Litany, and are silent on daily prayers; while the Prayer Book has gone on repeating in every edition the order for the daily prayers. In fact the daily prayers of the Rubric versus the holy days' services and twice a week Litany of the Canon is an absolute parallel to the modicum vesture as provided in the Rubrics versus the modicum vesture as provided in the Advertisements and Canons. In each case a named part does not exclude the partly-named whole. The principle of the daily prayers or of the holy days' services and bi-weekly Litany is the same, that of sanctifying week days no less than Sundays by public worship. Only the more strict provision lays down ideal perfection, and the less strict one respects practical material difficulties. The same distinction rules the two classes of vestiary prescription. The Rubric which orders a distinctive Eucharistic dress in augmentation of the normal garb of ministration in every church is the ideal per

fection. The Advertisements and Canons which limit this obligation to cathedral and collegiate churches are the concession to practical material difficulties. But this concession makes the import of the obligation within the retained area more emphatic. If the Eucharistic dress of the Rubric of 1549 symbolises, as we are so often told, unsound doctrine, still more stringently and offensively must the Eucharistic dress which the Advertisements and Canons incontestably force upon bishops and dignitaries symbolise that same unsound doctrine, which these prælati are in virtue of their pralatura commanded to set forth; for the higher placed a man is, the greater must be his responsibility. Unquestionably, then, the moral influence of a Bishop's or Dean's dress in the 'mother church' of the diocese is far more powerful than that of a Vicar or Curate in a mere parish church. The Bishop celebrating the Holy Communion in his cope at that mother church is the proxy for the whole diocese for whatever the cope used in that conjunction may or may not symbolise.

With the reciprocal concession at this stage of the inquiry that upon the face of the Advertisements either interpretation is equally plausible, we may profitably turn to history for collateral light. So I must ask who were the foes at whom the Advertisements, whether regal or only archiepiscopal in their authority, were aimed?

These foes must be sought within the Church of England, for in the eye of the law, at that date, the Church and the State of England were conterminous and identical. Were they persons, whoever they might be, who hankered after the older forms, and cherished hopes of retroceding even behind 1549? There is not the slightest hint in history of any action in any form from such agitators within the pale of the Church of England. Whatever any one may have felt, the men of reactionary activity fell off to Rome. Was it the party which sought its standpoint at 1549? No hint of any such party bestirring itself can be found except as represented by one, or at most two persons. These were Queen Elizabeth and perhaps Archbishop Parker; so by the supposition they would have launched the Advertisements against themselves. Elizabeth, moreover, was angered at the opposition directed so soon after her accession against the ceremonial of her own chapel. The party which was troublesome, discontented, and turbulent, and in the eyes of Queen and Bishops disloyal and dangerous, was that which later on was known as the Puritan-men ready to wreck Church and State rather than wear a surplice--so the Advertisements were aimed at and came down upon them as a measure of coercion, by no means sweetened by the active part which the Low Church Bishop Grindal took in working them. We know that the publication of that manifesto was to these clergymen an incitement towards further disturbances. The abundant historical evidence of the turbulent action of many of the London clergy has within these few months been vividly supplemented by the publication, by the Camden

Society, of a most interesting and graphic contemporary journal by no less an authority than John Stow, the antiquary.

Yet the ire of these bold and conscientious, but unruly men, was incited by the demand made upon them to adopt the surplice. To them the order to wear the surplice did not come as a compromise, but as the unwelcome instalment of a repulsive system. They were strong enough to cause apprehension even to so masterful a sovereign as Elizabeth, while she and Parker had to rely upon the support of the more conservative party in the Church-the party whose allegiance to the Reformed Church of England was proof against their appreciation of traditionary ceremonialism leading them on to secession, but who appreciated ceremonial all the same. Is it conceivable that the authorities would have taken such an opportunity of disgusting their friends by a curt prohibition of that ceremonial, so contemptuous as not even to name that which it was forbidding? Clearly the tacit appeal to them was to rest content with the enforcement of the surplice, while other things, except in cathedrals, were to rest in virtual abeyance.

It would be a happy event for the Church of England if a more critical reading of the Advertisements could be established, so as to open the way to a peaceful and moderate modus vivendi upon the ceremonial debate being generally reached by the peaceable way of opinion, and without recurring to the perilous and inflammable agency of law courts or of Parliament.

I am not writing as a lawyer, and if I content myself with noting the difficulties which may arise from the special application made by the judges in Clifton v. Ridsdale, it is not because I undervalue it or desire to slur them over. But it does not require to be a lawyer to distinguish between the general principle and the special application. Agreement on a general principle is a most important step before adjusting special details, which are most probably different in each different case, and are, therefore, within the compass of a distinction.

A. J. B. BERESFORD HOPE.

GEORGE ELIOT.

WHEN a great writer has passed away, the published expressions of criticism, admiration, or regret are not an infallible sign of the feeling that predominates among either the writing or the reading world. There is a degree of friendly regard that expresses itself with even exaggerated fulness on such an occasion, while profounder depths of feeling take refuge in silence, or a tacit assumption that the largest claims are self-evidently just. In the case of George Eliot there is a further reason for such silence; most of those who might have been able and willing to speak in appreciation of the writer or her books are disabled by the overpowering sense of their personal loss in the death of the best of women and the best of friends.

Mr. Lewes once observed to the present writer, 'I do not think you ought to review her books, any more than I ought;' and many of those who are best qualified to speak of our common loss feel no doubt that criticism is impossible to them, and therefore praise should be left to more impartial or indifferent judges. But I think we should have George Eliot's authority for the view that affection may quicken as well as impair the vision, and the instinct which imposes silence on the nearest friends of a great man during his life has never acted as a bar to their letting the world know after his death what they alone are able to tell it. The present writer, indeed, has no such claim to special knowledge; all who loved and reverenced her whom the world calls George Eliot know equally well the qualities of mind and character and the unequalled charm of manner by which she fascinated so many and such opposite natures. Only it may be suggested that the best critics of a writer whose works exercised the same kind of influence as her personality are not those who manifest an exceptional indifference to the peculiar power of both.

It is natural to wish to begin our acquaintance with a favourite author at the earliest possible date. To do so we may turn to the motto of the fifty-seventh chapter of Middlemarch, in the sixth book:

They numbered scarce eight summers when a name
Rose on their souls, and stirred such motions there

As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame
At penetration of the quickening air:

His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu,

Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor,
Making the little world their childhood knew
Large with a land of mountain, lake, and scaur,
And larger yet with wonder, love, belief,

Toward Walter Scott, who, living far away,
Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief.
The book and they must part, but day by day,
In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran
They wrote the tale from Tully Veolan.

Somewhere about 1827 a friendly neighbour lent Waverley to an elder sister of little Mary Evans. It was returned before the child had read to the end, and in her distress at the loss of the fascinating volume she began to write out the story as far as she had read it for herself, beginning naturally where the story begins with Waverley's adventures at Tully Veolan, and continuing until the surprised elders were moved to get her the book again. Elia divided her childish allegiance with Scott, and she remembered fastening with singular pleasure upon an extract in some stray almanac from the essay in commemoration of Captain Jackson,' and his slender ration of single Gloucester,' and proverbs in praise of cheese-rind. This is an extreme example of the general rule that a wise child's taste in literature is sounder than adults generally venture to believe.

6

Not many years later we may imagine her a growing girl at school. Almost on the outskirts of the old town of Coventry, towards the railway station, the house may still be seen, itself an oldfashioned five-windowed Queen Anne sort of dwelling, with a shellshaped cornice over the door, with an old timbered cottage facing it, and near adjoining a quaint brick-and-timber building, with an oriel window thrown out upon oak pillars. Between forty and fifty years ago, Methodist ladies kept the school, and the name of 'little mamma,' given by her school fellows, is a proof that already something was to be seen of the maternal air which characterised her in later years, and perhaps more especially in intercourse with her own

sex.

Prayer-meetings were in vogue among the girls, following the example of their elders, and while taking no doubt a leading part in these, she used to suffer much self-reproach about her coldness and inability to be carried away with the same enthusiasm as others. At the same time nothing was further from her nature than any sceptical inclination, and she used to pounce with avidity upon any approach to argumentative theology within her reach, carrying Paley's Evidences up to her bedroom, and devouring it as she lay upon the floor alone.

It is seldom that a mind of so much power is so free from the impulse to dissent, and that not from too ready credulousness, but rather because the consideration of doubtful points was habitually crowded out, as one may say, by the more ready and delighted