Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/72

 ceive no motive but by my own worldly interest or the gratification of my animal desires, I have not observed that beastliness, treachery, and parricide are the direct way to happiness and comfort on earth."'

Again, in the scathing review of Dr. Cumming's sermons, George Eliot protests with equal energy against the older Evangelical teaching that all virtue is useless unless done ad majorem Dei gloriam (p. 192). We thus see that it was disagreement with the ethical foundations of the current theology of her time which caused her revolt from it. Again, the chief interest of a somewhat unsympathetic review of Mr. Lecky's History of Rationalism consists in a passage at the end, in which she calls attention to 'the supremely important fact' that science had brought about a conception of the orderly action of law on human nature, a conception which, as has been seen, dominated her whole thought.

The only paper of purely literary interest in this volume is one on Heine, which is for the most part made up of translations of autobiographic fragments. It contains, indeed, an elaborate contrast of wit and humour, which is hardly more successful than the many other attempts in the same direction, and an antithesis of French wit and German humour, which is merely an expansion of a popular prejudice.