represent her mode of thought and feeling.  She was a somewhat rigid Calvinist and full of pious enthusiasm.  After her removal to Coventry, where her reading was of a wider range and her circle of friends increased, doubts gradually sprang up in her mind.  In a letter written to Miss Sara Hennell she gave a brief account of her religious experiences at this period.  In it she described an aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, who was a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris in Adam Bede.

There was hardly any intercourse between my father’s family, resident in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and our family—­few and far-between visits of (to my childish feeling) strange uncles and aunts and cousins from my father’s far-off native country, and once a journey of my own, as a little child, with my father and mother, to see my uncle William (a rich builder) in Staffordshire—­but not my uncle and aunt Samuel, so far as I can recall the dim outline of things—­are what I remember of northerly relatives in my childhood.

But when I was seventeen or more—­after my sister was married and I was mistress of the house—­my father took a journey into Derbyshire, in which, visiting my uncle and aunt Samuel, who were very poor, and lived in a humble cottage at Wirksworth, he found my aunt in a very delicate state of health after a serious illness, and, to do her bodily good, he persuaded her to return with him, telling her that I should be very, very happy to have her with me for a few weeks.  I was then strongly under the influence of Evangelical belief, and earnestly endeavoring to shape this anomalous English-Christian life of ours into some consistency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New Testament.  I was delighted to see my aunt.  Although I had only heard her spoken of as a strange person, given to a fanatical vehemence of exhortation in private as well as public, I believed that I should find sympathy between us.  She was then an old woman—­about sixty—­and, I believe, had for a good many years given up preaching.  A tiny little woman, with bright, small, dark eyes, and hair that had been black, I imagine, but was now gray—­a pretty woman in her youth, but of a totally different physical type from Dinah.  The difference—­as you will believe—­was not simply physical; no difference is.  She was a woman of strong natural excitability, which I know, from the description I have heard my father and half-sister give, prevented her from the exercise of discretion under the promptings of her zeal.  But this vehemence was now subdued by age and sickness; she was very gentle and quiet in her manners—­very loving—­and (what she must have been from the very first) a truly religious soul, in whom the love of God and the love of man were fused together.  There was nothing highly distinctive in her religious conversation.  I had had much intercourse with pious Dissenters before; the only freshness I