Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/103

 Jewish heart alone that can feel the entire magic of a creation woven from the highest hopes of that nation's soul. The book will win friends among the Jews, not only through the feeling of pride which may well arise in the breast of every honest man who sees his people honoured, but also, and chiefly, through the profound satisfaction which it will afford the thinker to find his individuality recognised and explained by a stranger. The one will rejoice heartily at finding what he long ago implicitly discerned, here so definitely expressed; and the eyes of the other will grow dim with tears when he beholds the dear, regretted features of a well-known face greeting him from the framework of the tale.

Loud has been the weeping and terrible the gnashing of teeth in the camp of the critics. Of what has the revered and idolised Queen of novelists been thinking that