il
his death. In the same year she translated Feuerbach's _Essence of
Christianity_, the only one of her writings to which she attached her
real name. It was not until she was nearly 40 that she appears to have
discovered the true nature of her genius; for it was not until 1857 that
_The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton_ appeared in _Blackwood's
Magazine_, and announced that a new writer of singular power had arisen.
It was followed by _Mr. Gilfil's Love Story_ and _Janet's Repentance_,
all three being reprinted as _Scenes from Clerical Life_ (1857); _Adam
Bede_ was _pub._ in 1859, _The Mill on the Floss_, in its earlier
chapters largely autobiographical, in 1860, _Silas Marner_, perhaps the
most artistically constructed of her books, in 1861. In 1860 and 1861 she
visited Florence with the view of preparing herself for her next work,
_Romola_, a tale of the times of Savonarola, which appeared in 1863 in
the _Cornhill Magazine_. _Felix Holt the Radical_ followed in 1866. Miss
E. now for a time abandoned novel-writing and took to poetry, and between
1868 and 1871 produced _The Spanish Gipsy_, _Agatha_, _The Legend of
Jubal_, and _Armgart_. These poems, though containing much fine work, did
not add to her reputation, and in fact in writing them she had departed
from her true vocation. Accordingly, she returned to fiction, and in
_Middlemarch_, which appeared in parts in 1871-72, she was by many
considered to have produced her greatest work. _Daniel Deronda_, which
came out in 1874-76, was greatly inferior, and it was her last novel. In
1878 she _pub._ _The Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, a collection of
miscellaneous essays. In the same year Mr. Lewes _d._, an event which
plunged her into melancholy, which was, however, alleviated by the
kindness of Mr. John Cross, who had been the intimate friend of both L.
and herself, and whom she _m._ in March, 1880. The union was a short one,
being terminated by her death on December 22 in the same year.

George Eliot will probably always retain a high place among writers of
fiction. Her great power lies in the minute painting of character,
chiefly among the lower middle classes, shopkeepers, tradesmen, and
country folk of the Midlands, into whose thoughts and feelings she had an
insight almost like divination, and of whose modes of expression she was
complete mistress. Her general view of life is pessimistic, relieved by a
power of seizing the humorous elements in human stupidi