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306 Power Cobbe, in 1859, remarks: “I am reading ‘Adam Bede,’ a quite extraordinary book. But I wonder that any one should have doubted that a woman wrote it. Strange is it that we tell the universal part of our history in all that we write!”

Since the publication of "Adam Bede," every successive work from the pen of George Eliot has intensified the interest excited by that work, and strengthened public opinion in its first estimate of her literary ability. Her late effort, "Middlemarch,” is causing her name to occupy the chief place in literary reviews, and sets the seal upon her as the greatest of living novelists. Even previous to its appearance, the Chicago Evening Journal, in an elaborate and carefully-prepared editorial on woman’s genius, gives her this high praise: “It is undoubtedly in the genius of George Eliot that English womanhood has its largest and most wonderful illustration. There are no novels in English literature which can be compared with hers for that