place; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint favorably many years ago. "An utterly uninteresting character!' I think I hear a lady reader exclaim-Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a character."

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hair-breadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people—many of them-bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows and their sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insignificance-in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share.

Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tone. In that case, I should have no fear of your not caring to know what further befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the homely details I have to tell at all beneath your attention. As it is, you can, if you please, decline to pursue my story further; and you will easily find reading more to your taste, since I learn from the newspapers that many remarkable novels, full of striking situations, thrilling incidents, and eloquent writing, have appeared only within the last season.

Let us now pass on to Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and the rest of George Eliot's works in historic

order, and see with what delicious fun, what play of wit, what ever-abiding and depth-illuminating humor, what creative genius, what manifold forms of living flesh and blood, George Eliot preached the possibility of such moral greatness on the part of every most commonplace man and woman as completely reduces to a level the apparent inequality in the matter of genius, and so illustrated the universal "russet-coated epic."

IX.

BEFORE Scenes from Clerical Life had ceased to run, in the latter part of the year 1857, George Eliot had already begun a novel more complete in form than any of the three tales which composed that series. Early in 1858, she made a visit to the Continent, and it was from Munich that a considerable portion of the MS. of her new book was sent to her publisher, Mr. Blackwood. This was Adam Bede, which she completed by the end of October, 1858.

It was brought out immediately in book form; George Eliot seemed desirous of putting the public to a speedier test than could be secured by running the story through successive numbers of the magazine, as usual; although the enthusiastic editor declared himself very willing to enrich the pages of Blackwood's with it. It was therefore printed in January, 1859.

I have already cited a letter from Marian Evans to Miss Henschel, in which she mentions the only two matters of fact connected in the most shadowy way as originals with the plot of Adam Bede. One of these is that

in her girlhood, she had met an aunt of hers about sixty years old, who had in early life been herself a preacher. To this extent, and this only, is there any original for our beautiful snowdrop-Dinah Morris, in-dam Bede Again, in the same letter, George Eliot mentions that this same aunt had told her of once spending a night in prison to comfort a poor girl who had murdered her own child, and that this incident lay in her mind for many years, until it became the germ of Adam Bede.

These are certainly but shadowy connections; yet, probably, the greatest works are built upon quite as filmy a relation to any actual precedent facts. A rather pretty story is told of Mrs. Carlyle, which, perhaps, very well illustrates this filmy relation. It is told that one evening she gave to Dickens a subject for a novel which she nad indeed worked out up to the second volume, the whole subject consisting of a weaving together of such insignificant observations as any one must make of what goes on at houses across the street. For example, Mrs. Carlyle observed of a house nearly opposite them that one day the blinds or curtains would be up or down; the next day a figure in a given costume would appear at the window, or a cab would drive, hastily or otherwise, to the door, a visitor would be admitted or rejected, etc; such bits of circumstances she had managed to connect with human characters in a subtle way which is said to have given Dickens great delight. She never lived, however, to finish her novel, thus begun.

This publication of Adam Bede, placed George Eliot decisively at the head of English novel-writers, with only Dickens for second, even; and thus enables us at this point fairly to do what the ages always do in order to get that notoriously clear view of things which comes with time, and time only, that is to brush away all small circumstances and cloudy non-essentials of time so as to bring before our minds the whole course of English fiction, from its beginning to the stage at which it is now pending with Adam Bede, as if it concerned but four names and two periods, to wit:

Now it was shown in the last lecture how distinctly the moral purpose of the English fiction represented by this upper group was announced, though we were obliged to record a mournful failure in realizing that announcement. Adam Bede gives us the firmest support for a first and most notable difference between these two periods of English fiction, that while the former professes morality yet fails beyond description, the latter executes its moral purpose to a practical degree of beneficence beyond its wildest hopes. Without now specifying the subtle revolutions which lie in Adam Bede, a single more tangible example will be sufficient to bring this entire difference before you. If I ask you to recall how it is less than fifty years ago that Charles Dickens was writing of the debtors' prisons with all the terrible earnest of one who had lived with his own father and mother in those unspeakable dens; if I recall to you what marvelous haste for proverbially slow England the reform thus initiated took upon itself, how it flew from this to that prison, from this to that statute, from this to that country, until now not only is no such thing as imprisonment for debt known to any of Dickens's readers, but with the customary momentum of such generous impulses in society, the whole movement in favor of debtors is clearly going too far and is beginning to oppress the creditor with part of the injustice it formerly meted out to the debtor; if, I say, I thus briefly recall to you this single instance of moral purpose carried into perfect practice, I typify a great and characteristic distinction between these two schools. For in point of fact what one may call an organic impracticability lay at the core of the moral scheme of Richardson and Fielding.

I think all reasoning and experience show that if you