great novelists have used it at times, they have proved unequal to the accomplishment of Dickens. Uncle Pullet in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss might almost be called "the man with the lozenges." Dalgetty, in Scott's The Legend of Montrose, is

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TEA.

Two famous characters in Dickens's
Martin Chuzzlewit.

to turn up; " Uriah Heep, of the "clammy fingers," the writhing body," and the "'umble" pretensions; Miss Betsey Trotwood, with an antipathy to donkeys; Mr. Dick, the weak-minded one who, despite Charles the First's

head, has sense enough to use his lack of sense to great advantage. Oliver Twist contributes chiefly to the rogues' gallery; but the Jew Fagan, the Artful Dodger, the personification of cruelty called Bill Sikes, and his loving, faithful companion Nancy, are unforgettable. Squeers, the schoolmaster, in Nicholas Nickleby; Mr. Pumblechook, the self-styled victim of ingratitude in Great Expectations; Sairey Gamp, the honest (?) nurse, friend of "Mrs. Harris," in Martin Chuzzlewit-the list might be continued into the hundreds.

The Debt of Gratitude Due Dickens. - Most eulogies on Dickens, as Mr. Chesterton has said, are bad; criticism of his characters must necessarily be inadequate. "Real primary creation," says this eminently successful eulogist of Dickens, " calls forth not criticism, not appreciation, but a kind of incoherent gratitude." And gratitude is the feeling expressed by Thackeray in the passage quoted above. Dickens's scenes of pathos may be too manifestly moist, his plots may be melodramatic, his characters and incidents may show exaggeration and too much coincidence; but these defects are of little weight in the scales when the innocent laughter and the sweet and unsullied page" are set over against them.

GEORGE ELIOT, 1819-1880

When George Eliot arrived in this world, her father recorded the event in his diary as the birth of "Mary Ann Evans." She preferred to write herself "Marian;" and when her first piece of fiction appeared, the name attached as author was that by which she is best known"George Eliot." Her choice of a masculine pen-name was due to a feeling that the public would look askance at the sort of story she wrote if the author were known to be a woman.

Education. She was born at Arbury Farm, Warwickshire, the "heart of England." She came of good stock not highly cultured; and her own formal education was limited to town schools in her native county, which she attended until she was twelve years old. While she was still a girl, the death of her mother made her the housekeeper. Though further schooling was out of the question, she con

tinued studying by herself. There is hardly a novel of hers which does not show good results from her labor in this line; for one is usually impressed, not merely by her masterly portrayal of English life and people, but by the extent of her information.

Religion.

When she was twenty-one, she and her father moved to Coventry, an important event in her life because

of associations formed there. Under the influence of a family named Bray, she became a sceptic, and stopped going to church. One of the strongest evidences of George Eliot's breadth is her sympathetic presentation of religious characters so utterly unlike herself as Dolly Winthrop in Silas Marner and Dinah Morris in Adam Bede. Her first publications were translations of German works dealing with religion - Strauss's Life of Jesus, and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity.

Influence of Mr. Lewes. In 1851 she became assistant editor of the Westminster Review. Through this connection she met George Henry Lewes, to whom she was united three years later. At Lewes's suggestion she attempted a work of fiction; and in Blackwood's Magazine for January, 1857, appeared the first instalment of The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, published the next year with two other stories as Scenes of Clerical Life. The volume was well received; and of all the critics who reviewed it, only Charles Dickens suspected that the author was a woman. If he was mistaken, said he, no man ever before had the art of making himself so like a woman since the world began."

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"Adam Bede" and its Source. In these stories the author drew largely from Warwickshire, using real incidents as well as real persons and places. Though in her first novel, Adam Bede, which came out the year after Scenes, she again drew on the same stock, she avoided so faithful a portraiture. The closeness to fact of the short stories seemed to her a mistake, and was, she admitted, due to inexperience. The hero of Adam Bede was taken to some extent from the author's father, Robert Evans, though he is not a portrait. Dinah Morris was modeled after an aunt of George Eliot's, and Mrs. Poyser has some characteristics that came from

George E

as one of convinced