Ir is not to be supposed that so remarkable a specimen of the human intellect as George Eliot's should have passed through its early stages without giving signs of what manner of spirit had come among us. While still making an idol of her doll, she was filled with that passion for books which in variably marks the childhood of those endowed with a powerful literary faculty. A child who loves meditation, or the observation of nature, or the practical work of life, better than books, may become a remarkable person,- a philosopher, a discoverer, or an organiser; but the literary genius must in early life be fed upon books, and these not few in number nor peculiar in scope, but embracing a wide range of subjects and of writers. In the young mind so predestined and so nourished, what is poor and bad passes off, what is good is retained; the more various

the material, the richer the result

namely, that power of expressing the best ordered thought in the best ordered language which constitutes excellence of style. Whether a really omnivorous young reader, seizing on and assimilating all kinds of lore (and this wide ranging and wide pasturing is very uncommon even among children who are said to be fond of books), will become a fine writer, may be augured with a good deal of certainty by a little observation. If the effect be to puff him up, to cause him to put away childish things, to seek grave converse and the praise of his elders, he will probably develop into one of those fluent phenomenons, oracles of the general herd (always gregarious of opinion), who possess a fatal facility of expatiating in oily sermons, gushing essays, copious journals, trivial histories, or pretentious novels. But if he preserve his

and Journals. Arranged and William Blackwood & Sons,

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freshness of interest in all that charms the young, the chances are many in favour of his development into one of those artists of the pen whose works will live and nourish the writers of the future. Where opportunities are small, much will depend on the character of the books at hand. Mary Ann Evans's home was not apparently very copiously supplied, but she was fortunate in those volumes which she could make her own. An old gentleman, nameless, but evidently worth crowds of ordinary old gentlemen in knowing the right thing and doing it, used to bring her sometimes a book as an offering, and among them the Fables of Esop-so sure, with their four-footed and feathered representatives of the wise and the foolish, to expand the imagination of the imaginative child, the sympathies of the sympathetic. An old copy of the Pilgrim's Progress,' with illustrations less artistic but more in unison with the ideas of John Bunyan than would probably spring from a modern pencil, was always at hand to lead her into a supernatural world, with its mysterious scenery of the House Beautiful, the Delectable Mountains, and the dreadful valley, and with such tremendous inhabitants as Giant Despair and Apollyon lurking in its recesses. Another much studied theological work, also illustrated, was Defoe's 'History of the Devil.' A less formidable morality was represented by 'Rasselas,' tedious only to readers whose appetite has grown fastidious with years. In relief to these grave works stood the jest-book of Joe Miller, the somewhat practical and unrefined character of whose mirth was corrected a little later by the gentler and chaster humour of Elia. It was not till the advanced age of eight that she became enamoured of the Waverley

Novels; and then what a share must those great romances have had in forming the future Eliot! Is it possible that she could ever have become what she did if for these had been substituted, let us say, the monstrous indigestibilities of Mr George Macdonald or Mr Wilkie Collins? So far, however, was she from growing proud as the possessor of all this lore, that she used to follow, like a small dog, the footsteps of a three-years older brother, who, after the manner of well-conditioned males of that time of life, permitted himself to be adored with much condescension and consideration. This fraternal alliance was, of course, the origin of the relations of Tom and Maggie Tulliver. It was interrupted by a pony, given to the boy, who found the quadruped a more interesting associate than the sister. The fact that Isaac Evans never became anything uncommon, remaining very much like his neighbours in pursuits and character, does not render in the least less natural the fact that he was worshipped by the little female genius. It is only commonplace little girls who are not prone to admire boys merely because they are boys, and with no more real ground than that on which the British public sometimes grows fatuous in its worship of tinselled and trumpery idols.

The little girl had another object of reverence in a father who had probably so much, and no more, of Mr Tulliver as to pet her, to call her his 'cute little wench, and possibly to be very earnest in his denunciation of those diabolic agencies "raskills"; but who had much more (though still with great diversity) in common with both Adam Bede and Caleb Garth. Probably the former represents him when an artisan in his youth,