strength, to enforce a life of duty and self-renunciation on her readers,—­to live at least for the good of humanity.  Nor did she court notoriety, like Georges Sand, who was as indifferent to reproach as she was to shame.  Miss Evans led a quiet, studious, unobtrusive life with the man she loved, sympathetic in her intercourse with congenial friends, and devoted to domestic duties.  And Mr. Lewes himself relieved her from many irksome details, that she might be free to prosecute her intense literary labors.

In this lecture on George Eliot I gladly would have omitted all allusion to a mistake which impairs our respect for this great woman.  But defects cannot be unnoticed in an honest delineation of character; and no candid biographers, from those who described the lives of Abraham and David, to those who have portrayed the characters of Queen Elizabeth and Oliver Cromwell, have sought to conceal the moral defects of their subjects.

Aside from the translations already mentioned, the first literary efforts of Miss Evans were her articles in the “Westminster Review,” a heavy quarterly, established to advocate philosophical radicalism.  In this Review appeared from her pen the article on Carlyle’s “Life of Sterling,” “Madame de la Sabliere,” “Evangelical Teachings,” “Heine,” “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” “The Natural History of German Life,” “Worldliness and Unworldliness,”—­all powerfully written, but with a vein of bitter sarcasm in reference to the teachers of those doctrines which she fancied she had outgrown.  Her connection with the “Review” closed in 1853, when she left Mr. Chapman’s home and retired to a small house in Cambridge Terrace, Hyde Park, on a modest but independent income.  In 1854 she revisited the Continent with Mr. Lewes, spending her time chiefly in Germany.

It was in 1857 that the first tales of Miss Evans were published in “Blackwood’s Magazine,” when she was thirty-eight, in the full maturity of her mind.

“The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton” was the first of the series called “Scenes of Clerical Life” which appeared.  Mr. Blackwood saw at once the great merit of the work, and although it was not calculated to arrest the attention of ordinary readers he published it, confident of its ultimate success.  He did not know whether it was written by a man or by a woman; he only knew that he received it from the hand of Mr. Lewes, an author already well known as learned and brilliant.  It is fortunate for a person in the conventional world of letters, as of society, to be well introduced.

This story, though gloomy in its tone, is fresh, unique, and interesting, and the style good, clear, vivid, strong.  It opens with a beautiful description of an old-fashioned country church, with its high and square pews, in which the devout worshippers could not be seen by one another, nor even by the parson.  This functionary went to church in top-boots, and, after his short sermon of platitudes, dined with the