Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/100

92 Above all other distinctions, this is the county of the softly-flowing Avon, and of that Stratford which is upon it, and of Shakespeare who was born there.

Near one of the towns of this county, a railroad junction now, called Nuneaton, an obscure country place then, containing an ancient Gothic church, an ancient grammar-school, and the ruins of an abbey connecting it with the life and sentiment of the Middle Ages, was born the writer nearest akin to Shakespeare in the qualities of her mind, Mary Anne Evans, who gave herself the name of George Eliot. I prefer the name by which she was known in her father's house; and the more, as she assumed the masculine appellative merely to serve a transient convenience. She was a plain English country lass, a carpenter's daughter, whose father called her his "Little Wench," and one of whose hands remained larger than the other to her dying day from making and shaping with it so many pounds and pats of butter. She was the youngest of the children of Robert Evans, who was twice married, and who had by the first marriage two children, and by the second three.

This stalwart and right worthy Robert Evans began his active life, like Adam Bede, as a carpenter, rising in due time to master carpenter, becoming afterwards forester, land-surveyor, land-agent, steward of estates, holding positions similar to those which his gifted daughter afterwards assigned to Caleb Garth, one of the noblest of her creations. Although Caleb Garth was by no means intended for an exact delineation of her father, we know that his most prominent characteristics, notably his veneration for " business," and his instinct to perform all tasks thoroughly, were marked traits of Robert Evans. It would be difficult, after reading Middlemarch, for us to think otherwise of him than that, like Caleb,