in his Staffordshire days. This man knew nothing concerning either author
or subject beforehand, and his astonishment was boundless on recognizing so
many friends and incidents of his own youth portrayed with unerring
fidelity, he sat up half the night listening to the story in breathless
excitement, now and then slapping his knees as he exclaimed, 'That's
Robert, that's Robert, to the life.'"

In _Adam Bede_, as well as in the _Clerical Scenes_ and _The Mill on the
Floss_, she describes types of character instead of actual personages; and
yet so much of the realistic is embodied that more than one of her
characters has been identified as being in a considerable degree a sketch
from life. This is true of _The Mill on the Floss_ even more fully than of
her previous books. In Maggie she has portrayed one side of her own
character, and made use of much of her early experience. Lucy is said to be
her sister, and two of her aunts are sketched in the aunts of Maggie--Mrs.
Glegg and Mrs. Pullett. Her brother recognized the minute faithfulness of
this story, as he did that of _Adam Bede_. The town of St. Ogg's is a good
description of the tide-water town of Gainesborough in Lincolnshire. The
Hayslope of _Adam Bede_ has been identified as the village of Ellaston,
four miles from Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. It is near Wirksworth, the home
of Elizabeth Evans.

The local exactness of George Eliot's descriptions is another evidence of
her realism. "It is not unlikely," suggests Mr. Kegan Paul, "that the time
will come when with one or other of her books in their hand, people will
wander among the scenes of George Eliot's early youth, and trace each
allusion, as they are wont to do at Abbotsford or Newstead, and they will
recognize the photographic minuteness and accuracy with which these scenes,
so long unvisited, had stamped themselves on the mind of the observant
girl." The historical setting of her novels is also faithful in even minute
details. The time of "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" is at the beginning of the
last quarter of the eighteenth century, and it well describes the country
customs of the earlier years of the present century. _Adam Bede_ describes
the first decade of the present century, while _Silas Marner_ is a little
later. With "Amos Barton," and _The Mill on the Floss_ we are in the second
decade of the century, before hand-looms had gone out or railroads had come
in. She has a fondness for these days of rustic simplic