the first rank, she succeeded more than most in measuring her powers and in achieving her ambitions. Her work moves between the manufacturing cities and the quiet country-towns, and she is more successful in the latter than in the former; her effects are produced by a multitude of tender and delicate touches, rather than by dark shadows or brilliant lights. No one describes like her a society where the stage of life to which belonged vivid passion, forcible incident, and absorbing motives has passed by for the principal personages of her story, and has not yet arrived for the secondary characters.

There is no authorised Life of Mrs Gaskell; but see Mrs Gaskell, by Miss Flora Masson (1903), the article in the Encyclopædia Britannica by the same writer, and that in the Dictionary of National Biography by Dr. A. W. Ward. The best criticism is by William Minto in the Fortnightly Review (vol. xxiv.). See also the obituary notice in the Saturday Review (1865) by Mr John Morley (?).

W. ROBERTSON NICOLL.

JEAN INGELOW.

From a Photograph by Russell & Sons.

Jean Ingelow (1820-97) was the daughter of a banker at Boston in Lincolnshire, her mother being of Aberdeenshire stock, and lived in the fen country or at Ipswich till about 1863, when she settled permanently in London. Her first efforts in verse were published anonymously as A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings (1850). It was her second volume of Poems (1863), which ran through four impressions in a year, that revealed her gift and her accomplishment-seen especially perhaps in High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire in 1571. Much of her poetry is of a religious, introspective cast; simplicity, grace, tenderness,

pathos, and sympathy are conspicuous characteristics; perhaps the ballads best show her power to move. She wrote many admirable stories for and about children, like Mopsa the Fairy (5th ed. 1891) and Stories told to Children; and a series of successful novels, amongst them Off the Skelligs (1872), Fated to be Free (1875), Don John (1876), and Sarah de Berenger (1879). A one-volume edition of her poems was issued in 1898; Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow, published anonymously, appeared in 1901.

Eliza Cook (1818-89), daughter of a London brazier, contributed to magazines from an early age, and issued volumes of poetry in 1835 (Lays of a Wild Harp), 1838, 1864, and 1865. For five years she conducted Eliza Cook's Journal (18491854), and reissued great part of her contributions to it in Jottings from my Journal (1860). Diamond Dust (1865) contained aphorisms and apophthegms; her last book of verse, New Echoes, had appeared in 1864. "The Englishman' ('There's a land that bears a well-known name') and 'The Rover's Song' ('I'm afloat-I'm afloat on the fierce rolling tide') are among her most successful things. 'The Old Arm-Chair,' 'God Speed the Plough,' and 'The Raising of the Maypole' also appealed to a wide audience; but many of her poems are very conventional and wooden. She sometimes affected a kind of imitation Scotch; apostrophised 'Charlie O'Ross, wi' the sloe-black een,' as 'the laddie wha blithely comes wooin' o' me;' and celebrated Burns's memory in stanzas with the refrain: 'Oh, bonnie sweet Robin is nae dead and gane.'

verses.

Adelaide Ann Procter (1825-64) inherited her poetic gift from her father, B. W. Procter ('Barry Cornwall;' see page 227), and at eighteen as contributor to a Book of Beauty was writing But most of her poems were published in Household Words (from 1853) and All the Year Round, though Dickens, her father's friend, did not for some time know who was the 'Miss Berwick' from whom her verses professedly came. Her poems were collected in two volumes, Legends and Lyrics, in 1858; a tenth edition appeared in 1866; and there were reprints in 1895, 1900, and 1901. Miss Procter, who became a Roman Catholic in 1851, took a lively interest in schemes for furthering the well-being of working women. The later years of her life were clouded by sickness, and she died of consumption after a long illness. Amongst the best known of her narrative poems are the legends of Provence and of Bregenz, 'The Angel's Story,' and 'The Story of a Faithful Soul.' Most of her best poetry is of a serious cast. 'Cleansing Fires' and 'The Lost Chord,' familiar as household words, are more solemn and significant than many hymns; and 'The Message' is grave and tender. Of her actual hymns two in common use are 'I do not ask, O Lord,' and 'My God, I thank Thee who hast made.'

George Eliot

is the name by which the great English novelist, MARY ANN or MARIAN EVANS, elected to be known as an author. The youngest daughter of the second family of Robert Evans, a Warwickshire land-agent, she was born at Arbury Farm, near Nuneaton, on the 22nd November 1819. Four months later her father removed to the farm of Griff, 'a charming, red-brick, ivy-covered house,' and this was her home for the first twenty-one years of her life. Evans was a man of strongly marked and strenuous character, many of the leading traits of which were transferred by his daughter to Adam Bede and Caleb Garth; and of the life at Griff, many of the features are given in the sketch of Maggie Tulliver's and Tom's childhood in The Mill on the Floss, especially her relation to her brother Isaac. Between five and nine she was at school at Attleboro, then at Nuneaton, and between thirteen and sixteen at Coventry. She lost her mother, whom she loved devotedly, in 1836, and from the marriage of her elder sister Christiana (1837) took entire charge of her father's house. Masters came over from Coventry to teach her German, Italian, and music; and of music she was passionately fond throughout life. She was also an immense reader. Her worship for Scott dated, she tells us, from the age of seven; 'and afterwards when I was grown up and living alone with my father, I was able to make the evenings cheerful for him during the last five or six years of his life by reading aloud to him Scott's novels.' In 1841 her brother Isaac married and took Griff, and her father removed to Coventry, where she became acquainted with Charles Bray, a writer on the philosophy of necessity from the phrenological standpoint, and with his brother-in-law, Charles Hennell, who had published in 1838 a rationalistic Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity. Evangelicalism had a strong hold on her from fifteen to two-and-twenty, and she seems at first to have hoped to convert her new friends; but by 1842 she had so greatly offended her father by refusing to go to church that he threatened to break up his household and go to live with his married daughter. Subsequently she withdrew her objection to church-going, and the breach was avoided. At the opening of 1844 the work of translating Strauss's Leben Jesu was transferred from Mrs Hennell to Marian Evans, and at this she worked laboriously and in very scholar-like fashion until its publication in 1846. Her father died in May 1849, and in June she went abroad with Mr and Mrs Bray, who left her at Geneva. In March 1850 she returned to England, and began to write for the Westminster Review; and in September 1851 she became its assistant-editor, and the centre of a literary circle, two of whose members were Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes (q.v.). It was then that she translated Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, the only book that bore her real name.

Gradually her intimacy with Mr Lewes grew, and in 1854 she formed a connection with him which lasted until his death in 1878. In the July of that year they went abroad together, staying three months at Weimar, where Lewes was preparing for his Life of Goethe. After a longer stay at Berlin, they returned and took up their abode first at Dover, then at East Sheen, and finally at Richmond. At Berlin she had read to him a bit of description of life in a farmhouse, and to Lewes's influence the impulse to novelwriting is almost certainly due; but if we judge from the defects of Lewes's own novels, we may doubt whether his influence on her work was

altogether for good. In 1856 she attempted her first story, The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton; it came out in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857, and at once showed that a new author of great power had risen. Mr Gilfil's Love Story and Janet's Repentance followed, the former based on an Arbury episode. All three were reprinted as Scenes from Clerical Life (1857), 'by George Eliot,' that pseudonym being adopted 'because George was Mr Lewes's Christian name, and Eliot was a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced name.' The brilliant story of Adam Bede (1859) had the most marvellous success; but, to George Eliot's amazement and annoyance, a Mr Liggins, who had lived in the same district of the Midlands as herself, had the effrontery to claim the authorship, and Mr Blackwood had actually to intervene ere Liggins was discredited. The Mill on the Floss (1860) is, as has been said, largely autobiographical in its earlier part; but its 'St Ogg's' is Gainsborough, which George Eliot visited in September

1859. Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), and Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), appeared next in succession. Romola, a story of Florence in Savonarola's time, appeared originally in the Cornhill, and brought her £7000. Her first poem, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), was followed next year by Agatha, The Legend of Jubal, and Armgart; and in 18711872 appeared Middlemarch, by some considered her greatest work. After that Daniel Deronda (1876), a Jewish story, showed a marked falling off; so, too, did Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), a volume of somewhat miscellaneous essays. Essays and Leaves from a Notebook (1884) consisted of old articles from the Westminster, Fraser's, and other serials.

After the death of Mr Lewes in 1878 George Eliot, who was always exceedingly dependent on some one person for affection and support, fell into a very melancholy state, from which she was roused by the solicitous kindness and attention of Mr John Cross, a friend of her own and of Mr Lewes's since 1869, and to him she was married on the 6th May 1880. Their married life lasted but a few months; she died in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, on the 22nd December of the same year, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, in the grave next to that of Mr Lewes.

As a novelist, George Eliot will probably always stand among the greatest of the English school; above Richardson, whom she greatly admired, and with whose painstaking and elaborate style of portraiture she had something in common, though in her preference for studies taken from simple rural life, from commonplace subjects so delineated as to bring out the humorous side of human shortcomings and the overmastering power of pitiable passions, she approached nearer to the still greater genius of Fielding. But her mind had not the movement and vivacity of Fielding's. If it had had that movement, that elasticity, that freedom of life in it, her genius would probably have shown itself much earlier than it did, and not waited till she was close upon forty before it betrayed even its existence. In early life she seems to have given her whole mind to the higher problems of life, and to have declared them virtually insoluble before she took refuge in portraying the disappointments, the breakdowns, the narrow discontents, as well as the generous hopes and unsatisfied ideals of other human beings. Having accepted with her usual too great docility the negative view of those who held that Christianity is a mere dream dreamt in the idealising mood of eager human aspiration, she passed on sadly to a pitying study of man in the frame of mind of one who is determined to make the best of a bad business. And she extracted, perhaps, from our human lot all the good that it is possible for any one to extract from it who has once come deliberately to the conclusion that, though something may be done to elevate, and a good deal to alleviate it, and though not a little amusement may be

extracted from it, yet that no power can really transfigure it, and that the more modest the aim, the less serious will be the inevitable disappointment. This subdued tone of regret that the highest human endeavour is destined to be baffled runs through all her tales; and it can hardly be doubted that their pervading melancholy is at least in some degree due to the false step which she herself, under the influence of a negative school of religious thought, had deliberately taken, when she sacrificed her own life to the ends of a connection out of which most of the joy, and almost all the sacredness, were taken by the unnatural and morally humiliating circumstances under which she entered upon it. It was greatly to her credit that in spite of these circumstances she steadily refused to lower the moral ideal at which she aimed, though she pursued it with scanty hope and without the assistance of the faintest trust in the help of any higher power.

George Eliot's mind was one of extraordinary reflective power, but deficient in vivid personal instincts. She notices in Silas Marner how slowly impressions grow up within us, and how little we are sometimes aware of the origin of even those impressions which are destined to produce the greatest effects upon our character and external life. 'Our consciousness,' she says, 'rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us. There have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.' Her Life and Letters appear to show that the suave and long-drawn melancholy and somewhat artificial condition of self-repression in which she lived grew upon her more and more as 'the sap circulated' and fed her ideal of the true relation of husband and wife. In story after story she attempted to impress upon others the absolute sacredness of the relations to which her own action had apparently shown her to be indifferent. Her most impressive stories, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda were all penetrated with the desire to show how selfish and desecrating what is called love may be without marriage, and how equally selfish and desecrating marriage may be without love; yet at every return to that subject there seems to be, in her treatment of the theme, less of hopefulness, less of awe, less of testimony to the sharp remorse which follows wrong-doing, less of vivid instinct, more of the tone of tragic warning, more of a tendency to acquiescence in inevitable misery.

Her studies of English farmers and tradesmen and of the lower middle class of the Midland counties are hardly surpassed in English literature, and give us at least as good a view of the life of the Midland counties, as masterly and fulllength portraits of the slow-moving, beef-consuming, habit-ridden population of those counties in the earlier nineteenth century, as Sir Walter Scott

has given us of the Borders and Highlands in older days, with their wilder and more adventurous people. But there is a great difference in method between the two novelists, corresponding pretty closely to the difference between their favourite subjects. Sir Walter loved to show his favourites embarked in perilous adventures. George Eliot, on the other hand, is seldom so successful as when she patiently develops her characters in rather slow but humorous dialogue-such dialogue as Shakespeare loved to interpolate in his plays when he chose to show us how the 'Goodman Dull' of the Midlands talked away in his stupid but comfortable self-satisfaction. Perhaps now and then she a little overdoes this microscopic view of inarticulate natures. In that curious short story of hers, The Lifted Veil, she gives a picture of a man with a quite preternatural insight into the vagrant and frivolous background of the minds of those amongst whom he lives, who is made to complain of the obtrusion on my mind of the mental process going forward in first one person and then another, with whom I happened to be in contact; the vagrant, frivolous ideas and emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance . . . would force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect.' Had not George Eliot herself some curious gift of the same kind? She seems sometimes to have had the buzz of dull but excited gossip almost revealed to her by a kind of disagreeable intuition, and to have written it down at too great length in order to rid herself of its leaden predominance over her imagination.

At all events, she is greatly inferior to Scott in play and richness of pictorial imagination, in rapidity of movement, and in warmth of colour. Romola, her one historical romance—though it is fall of subtlety of conception, contains some very striking figures, and is painted with a surprising minuteness of realistic detail-is a doubtful success. Sir Walter Scott never failed in making the chief historical figure of his historical romances the most interesting figure in his group. George Eliot did not thus succeed in painting Savonarola ; it was in Tito and Tessa that she achieved her great successes. As regards the historical background of Romola, one can hardly say that it holds its place at all as compared with even the least successful historical romance of Sir Walter Scott. George Eliot's imagination was not buoyant enough to travel back into these far regions of history, and create them anew for us; nor does her story move rapidly enough to make up for the difficulty of transporting our sympathies to so distant a region. We miss the vividness and we miss the action which are needful for the art of historical romance.

In her poetry, too, George Eliot falls far short of Sir Walter Scott; she is sombre, stately, even Miltonic after a fashion of her own, but Miltonic

without Milton's felicity and charm. She is as grandiose as Milton without being as grand. Sometimes she attains true grandeur-though not Milton's sweet and winning grandeur-as in her delineation of the selfishness that remained at the heart even of the inspired musician Jubal :

This little pulse of self that living glowed Through thrice three centuries, and divinely strowed The light of music through the vague of sound, Ached smallness, still in good that had no bound. Usually she falls quite short of true grandeur in her poetry, and seems to be impressive without actually impressing the reader. The rhythm is laboured, the thought is laboured, the feeling is laboured, and the effect is more artificial than artistic.

Perhaps the most curious feature of George Eliot's genius is that she wrote so very much better and with so much more ease when she was writing dramatically than she did when she was writing her own thoughts in her own name. There is hardly a good letter-considered as a letterin the whole three volumes, made up chiefly out of her letters, which Mr Cross gave to the world. There is, on the contrary, hardly an ineffective speech put into the mouth of any of the characters whom she delineated in her novels. Sir Walter Scott has given us a far larger proportion of ineffectively painted characters than George Eliot, though also a greater number of effectively painted characters. There is hardly a country squire, or dairymaid, or poacher, or innkeeper, or country lad or lass to whom George Eliot does not give a thoroughly individual voice; but when she comes to speak for herself, her voice is measured, artificial, monotonous, and a little over-sweet. Her letters read as if they were turned out by machinery, though machinery invented by some gently intellectual and laborious mind. Scott's letters are delightful reading; Miss Brontë's are full of interest; even Miss Austen's, though they disappointed everybody, give the impression of a lively and observant mind. But George Eliot's have no freedom or personal stamp upon them, unless the absence of personal feeling be itself a personal stamp. It almost seems as if her mind had been intended more as an instrument for interpreting the minds of others, more as a phonograph through the agency of which the natures of all the various interlocutors with whom she met could be delicately registered and made to report themselves to the world, than as a distinct organ of her own taste and purpose. George Eliot is in the highest degree original in her power of interpreting others, but she gives an effect of faded second-hand suavity when she comes to interpret herself. Nevertheless she will be named in the same category with Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, perhaps even above Miss Austen, if only for the richness and quantity of her admirable work.

Death of Mrs Barton.

The following Wednesday, when Mr and Mrs Hackit were seated comfortably by their bright hearth, enjoying the long afternoon afforded by an early dinner, Rachel, the housemaid, came in and said

'If you please 'm, the shepherd says, have you heard as Mrs Barton's wuss, and not expected to live?'

Mrs Hackit turned pale, and hurried out to question the shepherd, who, she found, had heard the sad news at an alehouse in the village. Mr Hackit followed her out and said, 'You'd better have the pony-chaise, and go directly.'

'Yes,' said Mrs Hackit, too much overcome to utter any exclamations. 'Rachel, come an' help me on wi' my things.' When her husband was wrapping her cloak round her feet in the pony-chaise, she said

'If I don't come home to-night, I shall send back the pony-chaise, and you'll know I'm wanted there.' 'Yes, yes.'

It was a bright frosty day, and by the time Mrs Hackit arrived at the Vicarage, the sun was near its setting. There was a carriage and pair standing at the gate, which she recognised as Dr Madeley's, the physician from Rotherby. She entered at the kitchen door that she might avoid knocking, and quietly questioned Nanny. No one was in the kitchen, but, passing on, she saw the sitting-room door open, and Nanny, with Walter in her arms, removing the knives and forks, which had been laid for dinner three hours ago.

'Master says he can't eat no dinner,' was Nanny's first word. 'He's never tasted nothin' sin' yisterday mornin' but a cup o' tea.'

'When was your missis took worse?'

'O' Monday night. They sent for Dr Madeley i' the middle o' the day yisterday, an' he's here again now.' 'Is the baby alive?'

'No; it died last night. The children's all at Mrs Bond's. She come and took 'em away last night, but the master says they must be fetched soon. stairs now, wi' Dr Madeley and Mr Brand.'

He's up

At this moment Mrs Hackit heard the sound of a heavy, slow foot, in the passage; and presently Amos Barton entered, with dry despairing eyes, haggard and unshaven. He expected to find the sitting-room as he left it, with nothing to meet his eyes but Milly's workbasket in the corner of the sofa, and the children's toys overturned in the bow-window. But when he saw Mrs Hackit come towards him with answering sorrow in her face, the pent-up fountain of tears was opened; he threw himself on the sofa, hid his face, and sobbed aloud.

Bear up, Mr Barton,' Mrs Hackit ventured to say at last; 'bear up, for the sake o' them dear children.' 'The children,' said Amos, starting up. They must be sent for. Some one must fetch them. Milly will want to '

He couldn't finish the sentence, but Mrs Hackit understood him, and said, 'I'll send the man with the pony-carriage for 'em.'

She went out to give the order, and encountered Dr Madeley and Mr Brand, who were just going.

Mr Brand said: 'I am very glad to see you are here, Mrs Hackit. No time must be lost in sending for the children. Mrs Barton wants to see them.'

'Do you quite give her up, then?'

'She can hardly live through the night. She begged

us to tell her how long she had to live, and then asked for the children.'

The pony-carriage was sent; and Mrs Hackit, returning to Mr Barton, said she would like to go upstairs now. He went upstairs with her and opened the door. The chamber fronted the west; the sun was just setting, and the red light fell full upon the bed, where Milly lay with the hand of death visibly upon her. The featherbed had been removed, and she lay low on a mattress, with her head slightly raised by pillows. Her long fair neck seemed to be struggling with a painful effort; her features were pallid and pinched, and her eyes were closed. There was no one in the room but the nurse, and the mistress of the free school, who had come to give her help from the beginning of the change.

Amos and Mrs Hackit stood beside the bed, and Milly opened her eyes.

'My darling, Mrs Hackit is come to see you.'

Milly smiled and looked at her with that strange, faroff look which belongs to ebbing life.

'Are the children coming?' she said, painfully.
'Yes; they will be here directly.'
She closed her eyes again.

Presently the pony-carriage was heard; and Amos, motioning to Mrs Hackit to follow him, left the room. On their way downstairs she suggested that the carriage should remain to take them away again afterwards, and Amos assented.

There they stood in the melancholy sitting-room-the five sweet children, from Patty to Chubby-all with their mother's eyes-all, except Patty, looking up with a vague fear at their father as he entered. Patty understood the great sorrow that was come upon them, and tried to check her sobs as she heard her papa's footsteps.

'My children,' said Amos, taking Chubby in his arms, 'God is going to take away your dear mamma from us. She wants to see you to say good-bye. You must try to be very good and not cry.'

He could say no more, but turned round to see if Nanny was there with Walter, and then led the way upstairs, leading Dickey with the other hand. Mrs Hackit followed with Sophy and Patty, and then came Nanny with Walter and Fred.

It seemed as if Milly had heard the little footsteps on the stairs, for when Amos entered her eyes were wide open, eagerly looking towards the door. They all stood by the bedside-Amos nearest to her, holding Chubby and Dickey. But she motioned for Patty to come first, and clasping the poor pale child by the hand, said—

Patty, I'm going away from you. Love your papa. Comfort him; and take care of your little brothers and sisters. God will help you.'

Patty stood perfectly quiet, and said, 'Yes, mamma.' The mother motioned with her pallid lips for the dear child to lean towards her and kiss her; and then Patty's great anguish overcame her, and she burst into sobs. Amos drew her towards him and pressed her head gently to him, while Milly beckoned Fred and Sophy, and said to them more faintly—

'Patty will try to be your mamma when I am gone, my darlings. You will be good and not vex her.'

They leaned towards her, and she stroked their fair heads, and kissed their tear-stained cheeks. They cried because mamma was ill and papa looked so unhappy; but they thought, perhaps next week things would be as they used to be again.