plash. In a letter to Professor Skeats, published in the _Transactions of
the English_ _Dialect Society_, she has explained her methods of using
dialect.

It must be borne in mind that my inclination to be as close as I could
to the rendering of dialect, both in words and spelling, was constantly
checked by the artistic duty of being generally intelligible. But for
that check I should have given a stronger color to the dialogue in
_Adam Sede_, which is modelled on the talk of North Staffordshire and
the neighboring part of Derbyshire. The spelling, being determined by
my own ear alone, was necessarily a matter of anxiety, for it would be
as possible to quarrel about it as about the spelling of Oriental
names. The district imagined as the scene of _Silas Marner_ is in North
Warwickshire; but here, and in all my other presentations of English
life except _Adam Bede_, it has been my intention to give the general
physiognomy rather than a close portraiture of the provincial speech as
I have heard it in the Midland or Mercian region. It is a just demand
that art should keep clear of such specialties as would make it a
puzzle for the larger part of its public; still, one is not bound to
respect the lazy obtuseness or snobbish ignorance of people who do not
care to know more of their native tongue than the vocabulary of the
drawing-room and the newspaper.

It may be said of George Eliot's realism that she did not borrow nearly so
much from actual observation as was done by Charlotte Bronte, in whose
novels, scenes, persons and events are described with great accuracy and
fulness. In large measure Charlotte Bronte borrowed her materials from the
life about her. Large as was her invention, original as her mind was, and
unique in its thought, yet she seems to have been unable to create the
plots of her novels without aid from real events and persons. Persons and
scenes and events were so vividly portrayed in _Jane Eyre_ as to be at once
recognized, subjecting the author to much annoyance and mortification. In
_Shirley_ there is even a larger use of local traditions and manners, the
locality of the story being described with great accuracy. George Eliot did
not use such materials to nearly so great an extent, being far less
dependent on them. Nor had she anything of Scott's need of local
traditions. Accurate as she is, she creates her own story, not depending,