to the belief of his church and looked cheerfully into the future. "Can't you fancy sailing into the calm?" he wrote to a friend. For him to die was to go "out of our stormy life" and "nearer the Divine light and warmth." In March, 1862, he practically resigned his task as editor of the Cornhill Magazine. Throughout this year and the next he lived in the old way, concluding his Adventures of Philip for the Cornhill, and working on a promising novel, Denis Duval, which, like Dickens's Edwin Drood, was left unfinished. Very sensitive to criticism, and holding strictly to his rights as a gentleman, Thackeray had, in 1858, hotly resented an article printed in Town Talk by the editor, Edmund Yates, who spoke of the novelist as one who "cut his coat according to the cloth," flattering the aristocracy at home and the democracy abroad. Thackeray forced the Garrick Club to expel Yates, who refused to make "ample apology;" but the latter had the aid and comfort of Dickens in this contest; and the two great writers were estranged for three or four years. It is pleasant to know that big-hearted Thackeray made the advances which led to reconciliation. With all his sensitiveness, he had no petty jealousies; his admiration of Dickens was unfeigned and was communicated freely to his friends. No more charming letters were ever written than those which Thackeray dashed off in the intervals of his work, often with a caricature or other sketch, and often, it must be admitted, with an atrocious pun or so into the bargain. His generosity was lavish, and spared neither his money nor his pen. One of his best essays appeared in the Times, to support an exhibition of Cruikshank's drawings and bring relief for a brother artist. His own affairs were in good case; and in the

spring of 1862 he had moved into a new house of unusually ample and luxurious design. Among his close friends of these latter days were Sir Theodore and Lady Martin, the latter best known as Helen Faucit, a charming actress who had made the heroines of Shakespeare her special study. His daughters, too, were all that a father could desire; and there was no lack of "that which should accompany old age " in the last scenes of Thackeray's life. In December, 1863, he seemed in ordinary health, though confined to bed for a few days by one of his attacks. Recovering, he spoke cheerfully to Dickens about the work he had in hand; but on the 23d he went to rest in some pain, was heard moving about in the night, and must have died, as Trollope conjectures, between two and three o'clock on the morning of the 24th. He was buried on the 30th in Kensal Green Cemetery.

GEORGE ELIOT

"THERE's allays two 'pinions," says Mr. Macey in Silas Marner; "there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him." Just at present the sagacity rather than the humor of this statement is the point for remark. The fairness of Mr. Macey, his desire to give both sides of the question fair play, was highly characteristic of his creator. George Eliot was certainly conspicuous among women for the masculine nature of her thought: its vigor, its philosophic zeal, its eagerness for truth. She sought earnestly, whether in poem, essay, or novel, to discover the moral motives underlying society. Her chief claim to renown, of course, lies in the skill with which she could follow those motives through the lives of characters in her novels.

The charge that her eagerness to teach her moral discoveries got the better of her, especially in her later works, is not wholly unfair. "She was born to please," writes one, "but unhappily persuaded herself, or was persuaded, that her mission was to teach the world, ... and, in consequence, an agreeable rustic writer ... found herself gradually uplifted until, about 1875, she sat enthroned on an educational tripod, an almost ludicrous pythoness." Though this estimate may go a little too far, it is nevertheless true that her pedantic manner obscures for many the full lustre of her genius. Still, in extenuation of the position of teacher which to many she seemed unduly to assume, it must be remem

bered that after the death of Dickens in 1870 she was really the greatest living novelist and that the reading public of England did look to her for instruction.

Yet from all accounts, this heavy manner of writing did not destroy the charm of her personality in conversation. Personally unattractive to strangers, she impressed those who knew her as a woman of extraordinary intellect and high ideals. Though her ways of thinking were vigorously masculine, her quick sensibility and affection were strikingly feminine; and the absolute necessity she felt for a supporting, sympathetic companion was also singularly feminine.

Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans, known to fame as George Eliot, was born at South Farm, Arbury, in Warwickshire, on November 22, 1819. Her father, Robert Evans, who had married Christiana Pearson as his second wife in 1813, was the son of a carpenter and was himself agent of one Francis Newdigate for estates in Derbyshire and Warwickshire. A few months after Mary Ann's birth the family removed to Griff House, on the high road near Nuneaton. About her childhood there was very little remarkable except the signs, to which her chief biographer, Mr. Cross, calls attention, of "the trait that was most marked in her through life

namely, the absolute need of some one person who should be all in all to her, and to whom she should be all in all." The country in which she grew up and the manners of the people there are familiar to readers of Scenes from Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and The Mill on the Floss. When she was five she was sent to Miss Lathom's School at Attleborough, near Nuneaton, and three years later to Miss Wallington's large school in Nuneaton. By this time she had begun to read consid

erably, such books as The Pilgrim's Progress, Defoe's History of the Devil, Rasselas, and the works of Scott and Lamb. When she was twelve she went to the Misses Franklin's school at Coventry, only to be called home at fifteen by the fatal illness of her mother. The death of Mrs. Evans in 1836 and the marriage of the eldest daughter, Christiana, in 1837, threw the charge of the household at Griff on Mary Ann.

Now begins one of the hardest yet perhaps most fruitful chapters of her life. The keeping of household accounts, the purchase of provisions, the making of butter and jelly and cheese occupied much of her time; but though she had to give up regular schooling, she did not, in spite of weak health, abandon her intellectual pursuits. Besides reading widely in English, she studied German, Italian, and science, and found time to play the piano for her father, who was very fond of music. She herself was already a skillful musician. In 1841, when her brother Isaac married and succeeded to his father's position at Griff House, she retired with the latter to Foleshill, near Coventry, and there formed a close friendship with the Brays. Mr. Bray, a wealthy ribbon manufacturer and a man of great culture, who often had as guests such men as Emerson and Froude, gave an added stimulus to the intellectual zeal of young Miss Evans. She took lessons in Greek and Latin, renewed her modern language studies with her old Coventry teacher, Signor Brezzi, and worked by herself at Hebrew. "She had no petty egotism, no spirit of contradiction," said one who knew her. "She never talked for effect. A happy thought well expressed filled her with delight: in a moment she would seize the point and improve upon it—so that common people began