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 was." Even his prayer after becoming virtually a murderer is not really a piece of hypocrisy. "Does anyone suppose," asks Eliot, "that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action?"

George Eliot is, however, even more impressed with the auto-intoxication of optimism as it manifests itself in what might be called group psychology; and especially against a disregard of the law of cause and effect does she turn the shafts of her quiet irony. At the period when the Raveloe tale opens,—

"It was still that glorious war-time which was felt to be a peculiar favor of Providence toward the landed interest, and the fall of prices had not yet come to carry the race of small squires and yeomen down that road to ruin for which extravagant habits and bad husbandry were plentifully anointing their wheels."

In pursuance of this comfortable philosophy,—

"* * * the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life."

In another story we are introduced to some "pious Dissenting women, who took life patiently, and thought that salvation depended chiefly on predestination, and not at all on cleanliness." In a higher social class this inno-*