Then came Dickens, amazingly popular, with his grotesque descriptions of life, his exaggerations, his impossible characters and improbable incidents:  yet so genial in sympathies, so rich in humor, so indignant at wrongs, so broad in his humanity, that everybody loved to read him, although his learning was small and his culture superficial.

Greatly superior to him as an artist and a thinker was Thackeray, whose fame has been steadily increasing,—­the greatest master of satire in English literature, and one of the truest painters of social life that any age has produced; not so much admired by women as by men; accurate in his delineation of character, though sometimes bitter and fierce; felicitous in plot, teaching lessons in morality, unveiling shams and hypocrisy, contemptuous of all fools and quacks, yet sad in his reflections on human life.

In the brilliant constellation of which Dickens and Thackeray were the greater lights was Bulwer Lytton,—­versatile; subjective in genius; sentimental, and yet not sensational; reflective, yet not always sound in morals; learned in general literature, but a charlatan in scientific knowledge; worldly in his spirit, but not a pagan; an inquisitive student, seeking to penetrate the mysteries of Nature as well as to paint characters and events in other times; and leaving a higher moral impression when he was old than when he was young.

Among the lesser lights, yet real stars, that have blazed in this generation are Reade, Kingsley, Black, James, Trollope, Cooper, Howells, Wallace, and a multitude of others, in France and Germany as well as England and America, to say nothing of the thousands who have aspired and failed as artists, yet who have succeeded in securing readers and in making money.

And what shall I say of the host of female novelists which this age has produced,—­women who have inundated the land with productions both good and bad; mostly feeble, penetrating the cottages of the poor rather than the palaces of the rich, and making the fortunes of magazines and news-vendors, from Maine to California?  But there are three women novelists, writing in English, standing out in this group of mediocrity, who have earned a just and wide fame,—­Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Marian Evans, who goes by the name of George Eliot.

It is the last of these remarkable women whom it is my object to discuss, and who burst upon the literary world as a star whose light has been constantly increasing since she first appeared.  She takes rank with Dickens, Thackeray, and Bulwer, and some place her higher even than Sir Walter Scott.  Her fame is prodigious, and it is a glory to her sex; indeed, she is an intellectual phenomenon.  No woman ever received such universal fame as a genius except, perhaps, Madame de Stael; or as an artist, if we except Madame Dudevant, who also bore a nom de plume,—­Georges Sand.  She did not become immediately popular,