but the critics from the first perceived her remarkable gifts and predicted her ultimate success.  For vivid description of natural scenery and rural English life, minute analysis of character, and psychological insight she has never been surpassed by men; while for learning and profundity she has never been equalled by women,—­a deep, serious, sad writer, without vanity or egotism or pretension; a great but not always sound teacher, who, by common consent and prediction, will live and rank among the classical authors in English literature.

Marian Evans was born in Warwickshire, about twenty miles from Stratford-on-Avon,—­the county of Shakspeare, one of the most fertile and beautiful in England, whose parks and lawns and hedges and picturesque cottages, with their gardens and flowers and thatched roofs, present to the eye a perpetual charm.  Her father, of Welsh descent, was originally a carpenter, but became, by his sturdy honesty, ability, and abiding sense of duty, land agent to Sir Roger Newdigate of Arbury Hall.  Mr. Evans’s sterling character probably furnished the model for Adam Bede and Caleb Garth.

Sprung from humble ranks, but from conscientious and religious parents, who appreciated the advantage of education, Miss Evans was allowed to make the best of her circumstances.  We have few details of her early life on which we can accurately rely.  She was not an egotist, and did not leave an autobiography like Trollope, or reminiscences like Carlyle; but she has probably portrayed herself, in her early aspirations, as Madame de Stael did, in the characters she has created.  The less we know about the personalities of very distinguished geniuses, the better it is for their fame.  Shakspeare might not seem so great to us if we knew his peculiarities and infirmities as we know those of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Carlyle; only such a downright honest and good man as Dr. Johnson can stand the severe scrutiny of after times and “destructive criticism.”

It would appear that Miss Evans was sent to a school in Nuneaton before she was ten, and afterwards to a school in Coventry, kept by two excellent Methodist ladies,—­the Misses Franklin,—­whose lives and teachings enabled her to delineate Dinah Morris.  As a school-girl we are told that she had the manners and appearance of a woman.  Her hair was pale brown, worn in ringlets; her figure was slight, her head massive, her mouth large, her jaw square, her complexion pale, her eyes gray-blue, and her voice rich and musical.  She lost her mother at sixteen, when she most needed maternal counsels, and afterwards lived alone with her father until 1841, when they removed to Foleshill, near Coventry.  She was educated in the doctrines of the Low or Evangelical Church, which are those of Calvin,—­although her Calvinism was early modified by the Arminian views of Wesley.  At twelve she taught a class in a Sunday-school; at twenty she wrote poetry, as most bright girls do.  The head-master of the grammar