influence on English speculation. Their chief interest consists in the evidence they give of George Eliot's early devotion to 'advanced' thinking and absorbing interest in the philosophy of religion.
Her importance in the history of English literature rests upon the series of fictions commenced in 1857 with the Scenes of Clerical Life, and concluded in 1876 by Daniel Deronda. It is not difficult to discern in these works two widely varying sets of artistic motives. The Scenes, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, and Middlemarch are all clearly connected by their subject-matter, and, in large measure, by their style of treatment. In them she went back to the scenes and days of her childhood. It has been often remarked that the plastic period of the literary artist, when impressions are retained with that minute observation necessary for the novel, ceases at an extremely early age. Dickens was only at home in the England of coaches and among the lower classes. George Eliot was most happy when recalling mid-England in the days before the Reform Bill. Her father was a land surveyor, and she thus came in contact with all classes of provincial society, so that her pictures are far more complete than either Dickens's or Thackeray's accounts of London
