ght write on it to somebody else."

The phases of life that he describes have had no more subtle
interpreter. He does not label his characters with external marks, but
enters into communion with their souls. His analytic method of laying
bare their motives and actions is strictly modern. His great master,
Fielding, would have been baffled by such a complex personality as
Becky Sharp. Amid the throng of Thackeray's men and women, there are
but few who are not genuine flesh and blood.

The art of describing the pathetic is unfailing in Thackeray. He never
jars upon the most sensitive feelings nor wearies them by too long a
treatment. With a few simple but powerful expressions he succeeds in
arousing intense emotions of pity or sorrow. He has been wrongly
called a cynic; for no man can be a cynic who shows Thackeray's
tenderness in the treatment of pathos.

Thackeray is master of a graceful, simple prose style. In its ease and
purity, it most resembles that of Swift, Addison, or Goldsmith.
Thackeray writes as a cultured, ideal, old gentleman may be imagined
to talk to the young people, while he sits in his comfortable armchair
in a corner by the fireplace. The charm of freshness, quaintness, and
colloquial familiarity is seldom absent from the delightfully natural
pages of Thackeray.

GEORGE ELIOT, 1819-1880

[Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT. _From a drawing by Sir E.W. Burton,
National Portrait Gallery._]

Life.--Mary Ann Evans, known to her family as Marian and to her
readers as George Eliot, was born in 1819, at South Farm, in Arbury,
Warwickshire, about twenty-two miles north of Stratford-on-Avon. A few
months later, the family moved to a spacious ivy-covered farmhouse at
Griff, some two miles east, where the future novelist lived until she
was twenty-two.

She was a thoughtful, precocious child. She lived largely within
herself, passed much time in reverie, and pondered upon deep problems.
She easily outstripped her schoolmates in all mental accomplishments,
and, from the first, gave evidence of a clear, strong intellect.

The death of her mother and the marriage of a sister left the entire
care of the house and dairy to Marian before she was seventeen years
old. Her labors were quite heavy for the neat six years. At the end of
that time, she and her father moved to Foleshill, near Coventry, where
she had ample leisure to pursue her studies and music. At Foleshill,
she came under the influence of free-thinking fr