erifying theory by actual experiment, arrives at a sort of beautiful climax and apotheosis as we proceed from the ab

the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, the growing personality of man sent out three new p

common physical concept of direction. For example: we may with profit construct a diagram in which it shall appear that at the renaissan

,-in the sense that the world is for man's use, is made for man,-that is, towards physical nature. We have seen how from the beginning of man's history the

the Novel, and Science, has left us those as the solid residuum of that movement; and it is not a mere sentimental generalization but a hard, scientific and unifiable fact that music is the distinctive form in which man's new relation to what is

ing far back to the times before music was music, and so making the case stronger, I long to remind them of a single line in a letter from Pliny the younger to Trajan in the year 110, which puts before me a dewy morning picture of music and Christian devotion that haunts my imagination-a line in which Pliny mentions some people who were in the habit of "meeting on a certain day before daylight and singing a hymn to Christ as to a God": or how in the fourth century the very Ambrosian chant which preceded the Gregorian chant is due to the fact that the good Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, casting about for solace, collects a number of psalm tunes and hymns and appoints them to be sung for the express purpose of consoling his people in their afflictions: and coming down to the birth of modern music, I long to remind these questioners of the noble and simple devoutness which Palestrina brings into the church worship with his music; of the perfect calm creative life of John Sebastian Bach whose music is so compact of devotion as to have in

ld purely by virtue of her extraordinary endowment as to all three of these relations which I have here sketched in diagram-these relations to the growing personality of man to that which

in the quietest way have each made an epoch, not only in literature but in life. These two women are Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot; and although our studies now lie more immediately with the latter, I shall find a frequent delight as we

which was entitled, The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, I find him addressing her as "My dear Amos"), George Eliot, Mrs. Lewes, and Mrs. Cross are one and the same person. Amid all these appellations I find myself most strongly attracted towards that of George Eliot. This was the name which she chose for herself; it was under this name that she made her great successes; it was by this name that she endeared herself to all who love great and faithful work; and surely-if one may paraphrase Poe-the angels call her George Eliot. Since therefo

ely received from London, called The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton. About 11 o'clock in the evening Thackeray, who had been staying with him and had been

or of a great magazine twenty-five years ago, but as about the first tangible utterance of the real George Eliot. The passage occurs early in the second chapter of the story. In the first chapter we have had some description of the old church and the existing

hat a narrow face of no particular complexion-even the small-pox that has attacked it seems to have been of a mongrel, indefinite kind-with features of no particular shape, and an eye of no particular expression, is surmounted by a slope of baldness gently rising from brow to crown. You judge him, rightly, to be about forty. The house is quiet, for it is half-past ten, and the children have long been gone to bed. He opens the sitting-room door, but instead of seeing h

the rustling of Mrs. Farquhar's gros de Naples. The caps she wore would have been pronounced, when off her head, utterly heavy and hideous-for in those days even fashionable caps were large and floppy; but surmounting her long, arched neck, and mingling their borders of cheap lace and ribbon with her chestnut curls, they seemed miracles of successful millinery. Among strangers she was shy and tremulous as a girl of fifteen; she blushed crimson if any one app

his toes were peeping out, dear child; and I can't let him walk anywhere except in the garden. He must have a pair before Sunday. Really, boots and shoes are the grea

a pair of slippers which had long ago lived through the prunella phase of their existence, and were now running a res

o or muslin, which before she left, had become a mysterious little garment with all sorts of hemmed ins and outs. She was even trying to persuade her husba

bedside, where also she placed a warm shawl, removing her candle, before she put it out, to a tin socket fixed at the head of her bed. Her body was weary, but her heart was not heavy, in spite of Mr. Woods the butcher, and the transitory nature of shoe-leather; for her heart so overflowed with love, she felt sure she was near a fountain of love that would care for her husband and babes better than she could foresee; so she was soon asleep. But about half-past five o'clock in the morning, if there were any angels watching round her bed-and angels might be glad of such an office-they saw Mrs. Barton r

e author had offered this as the first of a series to be called "Scenes from Clerical Life;" but no others of the series were yet written and the editor was naturally desirous to see more of them before printing the first. This appears to have made the author extremely timid, and for a time

ntil it was concluded in the number for November, 1857; the whole series embracing the three stories of Amos Barton, Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story and Janet's Repentance. It was only while the second o

ple was remarkable. In January, 1858, that is two months after the last i

ar Lon

cenes of Clerical Life,' whose two first stories I can never say enough of, I think them so truly admirable. But, if t

ly Yours

es Di

mely guarded in his expressions to new writers however promising they may appear. This traditional guardedness seems to have been completely swept away by these stories; Mr. Blackwood writes letter after letter to George Eliot, full of expressions that the hackneyed editor would ordinarily consider extravagant: and finally in a letter concerning the publication in book-form of the magazine-s

ly lived in that country, and began to inquire what member of their community could have painted these portraits. Presently, while the stories were running in the magazine, a newspaper published in the Isle of Man boldly announced that a certain Mr. Liggins, of Nuneaton, was their author. The only claim to literary power Mr. Liggins had, it seems, lay in the circumstance that he had run through a fortune at Cambridge; and in fact he himself denied the charge at first. But immediately upon the heels of Scenes of Clerical Life appeared Adam Bede, and the honor of that great work was so seductive that for some reason or other-whether because the reiteration of his friends had persuaded him that he actually did write the works, in some such way as it is said that a man may tell a lie so often and long that he will finally come to believe it himself, or for whatever other reason-it seems that Mr. Liggins so far compromised himself that, without active denial by him, a friendly clergyman down in Warwickshire sent a letter to the Times, formally announcing Liggins as the author of Scenes of Clerical Life and of

Liggins was the true author-and what with the more legitimate stimulus excited by the confirmatory excellence of Adam Bede, the public curiosity

o construct for ourselves some definite figure of the real flesh-and-blood creature

nd it seems pleasant to reflect that but a few miles off in the same county of Warwickshire was the birthplace of Shakspeare, whose place among male writers seems more nearly filled by Marian Evans or George

that Marian Evans was among the quietest of the quiet residents there seems cunningly enough indicated if we remember that when the good people of Nuneaton first began to suspect that some resident of that region had been taking their portraits in Scenes of Clerical Life,

letter relates to a controversy that had sprung up as to who was the original of the character of Dinah Morris-that beautiful Dinah Morris, you will remember in Adam Bede-solemn, fragile, strong Dinah Morris, the woman-preacher whom I find haunting my imagination in strange but entrancing unions of the most diverse forms, as if, for instance, a snow-drop could also be St. Paul, as if a kiss could be a gospel, as if a lovely phrase of Chopin's most inward music should

dge, Oct

r S

or seven years before he married my mother. There was hardly any intercourse between my father's family, resident in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and our family-few and far between visits of (to my childish feelings) strange uncles and aunts and cousins from my father's far-off nativ

Wirksworth, he found my aunt in a very delicate state of health after a serious illness, and, to do her bodily good, he persuaded her to return with him, telling her that I should be very, very happy to have her with me for a few w

emence was now subdued by age and sickness; she was very gentle and quiet in her manners-very loving-and (what she must have been from the very first) a truly religious soul, in whom the love of God and love of man were fused together. There was nothing highly distinctive in her religious conversation. I had had much intercourse with pious Dissenters before. The only freshness I found in our talk, came from the fact that she had been the greater part of her life a Wesleyan; and though she left the society when women were no longer allowed to preach, and joined the new Wesleyans, she retained the character of thought that belongs to the genuine old Wesleyan. I had never talked with a Wesleyan before, and we used to have little debates about predestination, for I was then a strong Calvinist. Here her s

nd one or two accounts of supposed miracles in which she believed-among the rest, the face with the crown of thorns seen in the glass. In her account of the prison scenes, I remember no word she uttered-I only remember her tone and manner, and the deep feeling I had under the recital. Of the girl she

father and I were living at Foleshill; then there was some pain, for I had given up the form of Christian belief, and was in a crude state of free-thinking. She stayed about three or four days, I think. This is all I remember distinctly, as matter I could write down, of my dear aunt, whom I really loved.

at I never remained in either of those counties more than a few days together, and of only two such visits have I more than a shadowy, interrupted recollection. The details whic

e of portraits. It is not surprising that simple men and women without pretension to enlightened discrimination should think a generic resemblance constitutes a portrait, when we see the grea

the feeling that in future years "Adam Bede" and all that concerns it may have become a dim po

, thanks,

your

ri

erceived the vocation for which her whole natural and acquired outfit had so remarkably prepared her. We find her translating Spinoza's Ethics; not only translating but publishing Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity and Strauss's Life of Jesus. She contributes learned essays to the Westminster Review; it is not until the year 1856, when she is thirty-six years old that her first slight magazine story is sent to Blackwood's; and even after his first commendations her timidity and uncertainty as to whether she could succeed in story-writing are so great that she almost resolved to

o moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye-these are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the fo

problems disappear unaccountably before a certain new energy of individual growth

f earth where she had been born, her gentle affection for animals; how the Bible and Thomas à Kempis were her favorite books, these and a thousand womanly traits I hope to bring out as we study some of her greater works,-for with all her reputed reserve I find scarcely any writer so sincerely communicative and so frankly desirous of sympathy on the part of her reader as George Eliot. In the next article I shall ask leave to present you with some pictures of the stage at which English novel-writing has arrived under the recent hands

very weary, but her heart was not heavy ...; for her heart so overflowed with love," &c. Fixing your attention upon this word "love," and reminding you how, at the close of the last lecture, we found that the whole movement of the human spirit which we have traced here as the growth of personality towards the unknown-towards fellow-man-towards nature,-resulting in music, in the novel, in science-that this whole movement becomes a unity when we arrive at the fact that it really imparts a complete change in man's most ultimate conception of things-a change, namely, from the conception of Justice as the organic idea of moral order, a co

s. Browning and George Eliot. In this very autumn, when we have seen the editor of Blackwood's Magazine reading the MS. of George Eliot's first story to Thackeray, Mrs. Browning

, yet very dramatically sums up a great number of ideas which converge towards it. In this scene G?a, the Earth, mother of men, is repres

nge wi

re than partne

n I dreamed th

ong ages of i

Then vexed with

nd wallowed in

nd slept, or d

r waking felt

ands, some soft

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et the sun, hi

mine! And with

se, the swan, t

ugh hung appl

harvest: breez

nd music, and

crystal break

n the mountain

er all things

e breathing o

hem into bea

march of ne

seless, or unc

m the seizure

e which stands by G?a bursts open, and Eros,

?

me spirit! art

all their in

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seasons lend

barren contin

r

, that I s

fringe th

yonder su

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first the

in the tw

er than t

em as you

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nt is my

force pur

shining