housands who have aspired
and failed as artists, yet who have succeeded in securing readers and in
making money.

And what shall I say of the host of female novelists which this age has
produced,--women who have inundated the land with productions both good
and bad; mostly feeble, penetrating the cottages of the poor rather than
the palaces of the rich, and making the fortunes of magazines and
news-vendors, from Maine to California? But there are three women
novelists, writing in English, standing out in this group of mediocrity,
who have earned a just and wide fame,--Charlotte Bronte, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and Marian Evans, who goes by the name of George Eliot.

It is the last of these remarkable women whom it is my object to
discuss, and who burst upon the literary world as a star whose light has
been constantly increasing since she first appeared. She takes rank with
Dickens, Thackeray, and Bulwer, and some place her higher even than Sir
Walter Scott. Her fame is prodigious, and it is a glory to her sex;
indeed, she is an intellectual phenomenon. No woman ever received such
universal fame as a genius except, perhaps, Madame de Stael; or as an
artist, if we except Madame Dudevant, who also bore a _nom de
plume_,--Georges Sand. She did not become immediately popular, but the
critics from the first perceived her remarkable gifts and predicted her
ultimate success. For vivid description of natural scenery and rural
English life, minute analysis of character, and psychological insight
she has never been surpassed by men; while for learning and profundity
she has never been equalled by women,--a deep, serious, sad writer,
without vanity or egotism or pretension; a great but not always sound
teacher, who, by common consent and prediction, will live and rank among
the classical authors in English literature.

Marian Evans was born in Warwickshire, about twenty miles from
Stratford-on-Avon,--the county of Shakspeare, one of the most fertile
and beautiful in England, whose parks and lawns and hedges and
picturesque cottages, with their gardens and flowers and thatched roofs,
present to the eye a perpetual charm. Her father, of Welsh descent, was
originally a carpenter, but became, by his sturdy honesty, ability, and
abiding sense of duty, land agent to Sir Roger Newdigate of Arbury Hall.
Mr. Evans's sterling character probably furnished the model for Adam
Bede and Caleb Garth.

Sprung from humble ranks, but from conscient