must be looked for not in one book, but in the whole tenor of her life.  Does this show that her maternal attitude was a “pose.”  It is often said that women are born wives or born mothers.  George Sand was undeniably a born mother.  Mrs. Oliphant resembled her in this respect.  They both show the deep passion of maternity in books and autobiographies and letters.  Both were devoted to their children, there was no company they cared for in comparison, and they spared neither trouble or time in their interests.  But George Sand cared much, not only for her children but for the peasants—­for the poor and oppressed.  Yes, and for the poets, the painters—­the singers and the musicians, with their temperaments of genius, their loves, jealousies, and their shattered nerves.  For upwards of six years she treated Chopin with a mother’s care; she had the passion of maternity in her towards them all, with whatever feelings it may have been complicated in her life of manifold experiences and with her artist temperament.  She may have leant heavily on it at times, it may have served as a weapon of defence when she was attacked, and used thus it may well have suggested a “pose.”  But however used, whatever the purpose—­that the maternal instinct was strong in her there is no denying.  To explain definitely her social and personal moral standards requires a biography that has not yet been written.  Socially she had a hatred of feudalism, of religious and military despotism.  She sympathised with and helped the aspirations towards a wider, a more humane view of a social system, and fraternal equality and social liberty were to her holy doctrines.  Perhaps fully to understand George Sand from within may require the genius of a French mind and one of her own generation; for the French of the present day neither study her, or appear to care much for her books.  Her letters should aid in giving a discriminating record of her intense and intricate life as viewed from within, and the ideas on which that life was lived.  What then were the leading principles, and what was the force in George Sand, which while conquering life and harmonising it enabled her to realise herself?  If heredity influences moral standards the mystery certainly is whence George Eliot derived not her morality, but her “fire of insurgency.”  It is not difficult to account for it in George Sand when we remember her mother’s life and temperament, and her own early years.  Her father was a good soldier, but had also many literary gifts.  George Sand herself said:  “Character is hereditary, if my readers wish to know me, they must know my father.”  George Eliot’s creed and pervading view of life was the supreme responsibility of it, and the inevitableness of the struggles of the spirit warring against the senses.  Her ideal is attainment through great trial.  George Sand, the born hater of conventions, developed life into a harmony.  We feel ultimately in her, a sense of peculiar serenity and peace, of