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 during the years 1855 and 1856 could have given the Scenes of Clerical Life to the world a year later? What was the determining motive which changed the translator of Strauss and Feuerbach and the writer of these essays into the loving creator of Mr. Gilfil, of Bartle Massey, and of Dinah Morris? It is not so much the late flowering of her genius that is noteworthy. The end of the 'thirties' seems the appropriate period for a novelist's debut. Both Thackeray and Miss Austen were thirtyseven (the same age as George Eliot in 1857) when Vanity Fair and Sense and Sensibility respectively appeared; Trollope was thirtynine when The Warden was published; and Walter Scott was as old as forty-three when Waverley first delighted the world. But all these had given indication in one way or another of their powers, and had certainly not given indication of ability of quite a different calibre and in quite an opposite tendency of mind; whereas George Eliot up to her first appearance as a novelist had shown marked capacity for abstract thought, the very antithesis of the concrete imagination essential for the novelist.

Up to the age of thirty-seven what do we find in George Eliot's writings? A vivid appreciation of the course of religious thought, a considerable power of social generalisation,