GEORGE HENRY LEWES.

writers ever know their real vein. But for this outward stimulation, she might have remained through life the accurate translator, the brilliant reviewer, the thoughtful poet, to whom accuracy of poetic form was somewhat wanting, rather than as the writer of fiction who has swayed the hearts of men as no other writer but Walter Scott has done, or even attempted to do.

In the maturity of her life and intellectual powers she became known as a writer of fiction. There are those who now regard the Scenes of Clerical Life as her best work. Beautiful as they are, that is not our opinion, and, at any rate, the Scenes failed to attract much notice at first. The publication of Adam Bede, however, took the world by storm.

As in the Scenes of Clerical Life the actual surroundings and the mere sketch outlines of many of the characters were drawn from her Warwickshire home, so in Adam Bede she has gone for her scenery to Derbyshire, the cradle of her family. That Dinah Morris was to some extent a real character has long been said. A letter to Miss Hennell, recently published, tells us how exceedingly little of actual portraiture there was, and as Shaks peare with the stories which formed the basis of his plays, she has infused and irradiated the simplest and commonest facts with her own light and warmth and eloquence. The likeness, however, was recognized at once. There lies before us a very curious little book, published in 1859 by Tallant and Co., of 21 Paternoster Row, called "Seth Bede, the Methody: His Life and Labors, chiefly written by Himself," from which we find that Hayslope is the little village of Roston, four miles from Ashbourne. Adam and Seth were Samuel and William Evans; but the Dinah of real life cast in her lot, not with Adam, but with Seth. The incident of their father's death is true, and Samuel Evans himself describes the process of his conversion, his instruction by "Mr. Beresford, a class-leader, and a precious man of God," and his after-career as a Methodist. The account of Dinah is extremely interesting, and, from the Methodist point of

her life became known, that any special importance has been attributed to them. That each largely influenced the other is true, but the influence was the subtle effect of companionship and association, and certainly there was but very little of direct stimulation, or even direct criticism. Mr. Lewes's character attained a stability and pose in which it had been somewhat lacking, and the quiet of an orderly and beautiful home enabled him to concentrate himself more and more on works demanding sustained intellectual effort, while Mrs. Lewes's intensely feminine nature found the strong man on whom to lean in the daily business of life, for which she was physically and intellectually unfitted. Her own somewhat sombre cast of thought was cheered, enlivened, and diversified by the vivacity and versatility which characterized Mr. Lewes, and made him seem less like an Englishman than a very agreeable foreigner. Was the char-view, entirely confirms the statement givacter of Ladislaw, to ourselves one of very great charm, in any degree drawn from George Henry Lewes, as his wife first remembered him? The suggestion that she should try her hand at fiction undoubtedly came from Mr. Lewes. Probably no great

en by her niece, both in the novel and in the letter to Miss Hennell. But the little tract quotes with the utmost coolness Dinah's prayer on the village green as "having been preserved," the real fact being that it is quoted bodily out of the novel;

and of this Miss Evans herself says, "How | case in this singular country of ours, by curious it seems to me that people should their ecclesiastical differences of High and think Dinah's sermon, prayers, and speech- Low Church. In that Coventry neighes were copied, when they were written, borhood it was perhaps only the publicawith hot tears, as they surged up in my tion of after-works, which Mr. Liggins did own mind!" Perhaps the greatest com- not see fit to copy, that entirely exploded pliment, though an equivocal one, that his preposterous claims. can be paid to a man's own compositions is that others should endeavor to steal them. This was the case with the novel of Adam Bede. Finding that the

This novel showed the great range of characters over which the author's observations and fancy extended; they showed also her deep and wide sympathy. All

author desired to remain unknown, a poor writers but the greatest-a Shakspeare, a creature, whose name should be gibbet- Goethe, a Scott, a George Eliot-take ined as Joseph Liggins, residing at Nunea- terest in their own class, their own coton, being in needy circumstances, claim- religionists, alone. The others of whom ed the novel, stating that, after the man- they speak come in as the supernumeraner of Milton and other great authors, heries on a stage, to fill up the background had received for it a wholly inadequate sum, and showing to various persons the manuscript, which he had taken the trouble to make from the printed book, asked and received certain moneys to supplement his publishers' niggardliness. His cause was enthusiastically espoused by one or two neighboring clergy, and in spite of the real author's denial of Mr. Liggins's claims, a hot controversy raged for a time, the parties being sharply divided, as is the

of the picture, but those who bring them seem not to consider whether they are men and women with human hearts, or merely marionettes. But the great writer shows that even the humblest, "if you prick them, will bleed," and discovers the human touch of goodness in the most unpromising characters-in the poor frivolous little Hetty, in the sensuous, pleasureloving Arthur Donnithorne, as well as in Dinah and Mr. Irwine. The sole point,

perhaps, in which her early country train-itations, yet with his shrewdness, his pleaing comes out is the omission, or almost santry, and his human heart. omission, from her canvas of the lowest stratum of country life-the agricultural laborer pure and simple. In English village life, along with perfect freedom of intercourse and direct plainness of speech, caste is even more marked than in the higher ranks of English society. The demarkations are not easily understood, but they are there, when to the outward observer the differences are not very plain between the sections of village ranks, as an undulating country may often seem a dead flat from the mountain height. The miller, the master-carpenter, the small farmer, are each more severed from the mere laborer than are the Mr. Irwines and the Squire Donnithornes, in whose case there is no danger of confusion. It is probable, therefore, that the few laborers whom she specifies are drawn as direct portraits; and George Eliot has made but few advances into the land which Mr. Hardy knows so thoroughly, and which is so peculiarly his own. He, and he alone, sees the English peasant as Shakspeare saw him, with all his accidental lim

There is no need to discuss in detail novels which are the possession of all English-speaking people, which are as much admired in America as in England, which most of their readers there, as here, believe to be of no ephemeral interest, but part of the abiding literature of both lands. Enough to say that, omitting the very highest and the very lowest sections of modern society, these novels present a photographic picture of English life which will give to the future reader the same sort of truthful information of the early Victorian time that Shakspeare's plays do of Elizabeth's England. We say the early Victorian age: we might even put the date a few years further back, because the quiet lady whose life was one of so much outward peace did not willingly describe the more strenuous aspects of our time. We hear but little of the steam-ship, of the railway, of the hurry of our London life-that London which, as a sponge draws water, seems to gather to itself the life-blood of the country.

That the mind of her who penned these

ly despite of some defects of form-which closes the volume, Jubal and Other Poems, so well known by its first line:

"O, may I join the choir invisible!"

An unsatisfactory immortality, it may appear to many; but it is one which seemed to her to carry out most fully the great creed of self-renunciation, the giving all for others, hoping for nothing again, either in time or in eternity.

Perhaps no one filling a large portion of the thoughts of the public in two hemispheres has ever been so little known to the public at large. Always in delicate health, always living a student life, caring little for what is called general society, though taking a genial delight in that of her chosen friends, she very seldom appeared in public. She went to the houses of but a few, finding it less fatiguing to see her friends at home. Those who knew her by sight beyond her own immediate circle did so from seeing her take her quiet drives in Regent's Park and the northern slopes of London, or from her attendance at those concerts at which the best music of the day was to be heard. There, in a front row, in rapt attention, were always to be seen Mr. and Mrs. Lewes, and none who saw that face ever forgot its power and spiritual beauty. To the casual observer there was but little of what is generally understood to be beauty of form.

We have said already that we do not make any direct criticism on her novels. Let this alone be said, that to us Middlemarch seems the crowning work of her life; not, however, that Daniel Deronda showed any falling off of power, but that in her eager desire to do justice to a great race, too cruelly misunderstood, she chose a theme in which the world at large was less specially interested. But her intellectual eye was not dim at the last, neither was her intellectual force abated, and it is possible that she might have surpassed herself even as she was in Middlemarch. In more than one striking passage in But we shall never have an opportunity his novels Mr. Hardy has recognized the of guessing on imperfect data. Most wise- fact that the beauty of the future, as the