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1885.] would joyously devise dinners for bringing old and new supporters of the Magazine pleasantly together, and many a famous book or paper has owed its germ, or part of its merit, to ideas struck out in his dining-room in Edinburgh, or at his cheerful Fifeshire home of Strathtyrum. George Eliot at once, and ever after, cordially recognised what she felt to be her good fortune in lighting on a publisher so genial: her previous ideas of publishers had probably run altogether on formal letters, interviews in offices, dry estimates, and balance-sheets; and there was something of surprise at finding how the business transactions were so mixed up with good offices and friendly care for her interests as to be entirely transfigured. In acknowledging some favourable criticisms which he had transmitted, she says: –

"I am like a deaf person, to whom some one has just shouted that the company round him have been paying him compliments for the last half-hour. Let the best come, you will still be the person outside my own home who first gladdened me about 'Adam Bede,' and my success will always please me the better because you will share the pleasure."

In the 'Scenes of Clerical Life' she had depicted many real persons so truthfully that there was general recognition of them by their former neighbours at Nuneaton; insomuch that an inhabitant of the place, aided by her incognito, was tempted to lay claim to the authorship of her works, and actually got some foolish persons to believe in him. But she perceived this kind of portraiture to be not artistically the best. In her next book, while drawing largely on her recollections of what she had seen and heard in early life, she pursued the truer method of using these as materials which imagination should mould for a purpose. In reading 'Adam Bede,' it is impossible not to perceive her inestimable good fortune in having a social origin no higher than to be the daughter of a man who began life as a master-carpenter, and ended it as a land agent. Most persons born in a station favourable to the writing of novels, stand far from the inner life of the classes socially beneath them. But here we have the quite new combination of the highest culture dealing with the life of the working classes from their own standpoint. Among the infinite advantages resulting from this, it was one quite unshared by any other writer to have had an aunt who was a Methodist preacher. Years before, this old lady, then about sixty, paid her niece a visit at Griff, and told, among other experiences of her career as an evangelist, how she had once been called on to comfort the last moments in prison of a country girl, condemned for the murder of her infant, and had accompanied her in the cart to the scaffold. This tale had made a deep impression on Mary Ann; and when, after her first success with the shorter tales, she resolved to try whether she could write a novel, she took this incident as the groundwork of her plot: and thus it chanced that all the charming lifelike personages of the tale – all the humorous and pathetic scenes which place 'Adam Bede' at the head of representations of rural life – received their being from a source which appears to us the least real or admirable part of the work.

It was only the suggestion of Dinah which was derived from the Methodist aunt. That real personage was a little black-eyed woman, full of zeal, but destitute of the grace, the restraint and re-