school in Coventry taught her Greek and Latin, while Signor Brizzi gave her lessons in Italian, French, and German; she also played on the piano with great skill.  Her learning and accomplishments were so unusual, and gave such indication of talent, that she was received as a friend in the house of Mr. Charles Bray, of Coventry, a wealthy ribbon-merchant, where she saw many eminent literary men of the progressive school, among whom were James Anthony Froude and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

At what period the change in her religious views took place I have been unable to ascertain,—­probably between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five, by which time she had become a remarkably well-educated woman, of great conversational powers, interesting because of her intelligence, brightness, and sensibility, but not for her personal beauty.  In fact, she was not merely homely, she was even ugly; though many admirers saw great beauty in her eyes and expression when her countenance was lighted up.  She was unobtrusive and modest, and retired within herself.

At this period she translated from the German the “Life of Jesus,” by Strauss, Feuerbach’s “Essence of Christianity,” and one of Spinoza’s works.  Why should a young woman have selected such books to translate?  How far the writings of rationalistic and atheistic philosophers affected her own views we cannot tell; but at this time her progressive and advanced opinions irritated and grieved her father, so that, as we are told, he treated her with intolerant harshness.  With all her paganism, however, she retained the sense of duty, and was devoted in her attentions to her father until he died, in 1849.  She then travelled on the Continent with the Brays, seeing most of the countries of Europe, and studying their languages, manners, and institutions.  She resided longest in a boarding-house near Geneva, amid scenes renowned by the labors of Gibbon, Voltaire, and Madame de Stael, in sight of the Alps, absorbed in the theories of St. Simon and Proudhon,—­a believer in the necessary progress of the race as the result of evolution rather than of revelation or revolution.

Miss Evans returned to England about the year 1857,—­the year of the Great Exhibition,—­and soon after became sub-editor of the “Westminster Review,” at one time edited by John Stuart Mill, but then in charge of John Chapman, the proprietor, at whose house, in the Strand, she boarded.  There she met a large circle of literary and scientific men of the ultra-liberal, radical school, those who looked upon themselves as the more advanced thinkers of the age, whose aim was to destroy belief in supernaturalism and inspiration; among whom were John Stuart Mill, Francis Newman, Herbert Spencer, James Anthony Froude, G.H.  Lewes, John A. Roebuck, and Harriet Martineau,—­dreary theorists, mistrusted and disliked equally by the old Whigs and Tories, high-churchmen, and evangelical Dissenters; clever thinkers and learned doubters, but arrogant, discontented, and defiant.