to take up life with the man who
stimulated her mind and actually made her one of the greatest of
English novelists.

Left alone, it is very doubtful whether George Eliot ever would have
found herself, ever would have developed that mine of reminiscence
which produced those perfect early stories of English country life. To
George Henry Lewes, the man for whose love and companionship she
incurred social ostracism, readers in all English-speaking countries
owe a great debt of gratitude, for it was his wise counsel and his
constant stimulus and encouragement which resulted in making George
Eliot a writer of fine novels instead of an essayist on ethical and
religious subjects. It detracts little from this debt that Lewes was
also responsible for the stimulus of George Eliot's bent toward
philosophical speculation and to that cold if clear scientific
thought, which spoiled parts of _Middlemarch_ and ruined _Daniel
Deronda_.

Marian Evans was born at Ashbury farm in Warwickshire in 1819 and died
in 1880. Her father was the agent for a large estate, and the happiest
hours of her girlhood were spent in driving about the country with
him. Those keen eyes which saw so deeply into human nature were early
trained to observe all the traits of the English rustic, and those
childish impressions gave vitality to her humorous characters. Before
she was ten years old Marian had read Scott and Lamb, as well as
_Pilgrim's Progress_ and _Rasselas_. When thirteen years old she
revealed unusual musical gifts. She had the misfortune at seventeen to
lose her mother, and for years after she managed her father's house.

Evidently the old farmer, whom his daughter has sketched with loving
hand in _Adam Bede_, took great pride in the mental superiority of his
daughter, for he hired tutors for her in Latin, Greek, Italian and
German. All four languages she mastered as few college men master
them. She read everything, both old and new, and her intimacy with the
wife of Charles Bray of Coventry led her to refuse to go to church.
This free thinking angered her father and caused him to demand that
she leave his house. After three weeks her love and her keen sense of
duty led her to conform to her father's wishes and to resume the
church-going, which in his eyes was a part of life that could not be
dropped.

But that early departure from the established religion carried her
into the field of German skepticism. She translated Strauss' _Life of
Jesus