Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/147

 no time for that any more than we have at Leeds—he had the Pottage and the Skins ready when they were wanted, and so he became the father of a great people. He stuck to his business, and so his business stuck to him." It was to such heart-lifting discourses as this that I listened in the old grey chapel thirty years ago, and still the preacher's tones, the faint aroma of hair-oil and peppermint, the listening faces of the sturdy, well-to-do congregation, and the sweet notes of the hymn return to me when I open the leaves of "John Halifax."

So it is in a greater or less degree with the works of the other writers I have mentioned. I should like to see on the title-pages of George Eliot's wonderful books three well-known words—Beth-el I'll raise. In formal theological belief, perhaps, she was severed from us; none the less does one gather from her pages the aroma of the good, old-fashioned "meeting-houses" of the Midlands, of placid, gentle, undulating scenery, of plain red-brick country-towns, and above all of