and, above all, a deep interest in the scientific and philosophic speculations of her time. If any one had ventured a prophecy of her future career, he would surely have anticipated some incursion into the region of religious reconstruction, as was the case with her friend Miss Hennell. He might have foreseen in her another Harriet Martineau, with a deeper ethical basis, but with the same tendency to pure reason. The last thought that would have entered the minds of her most intimate friends up to that date would have been that Marian Evans would revive in the enduring form of art the reminiscences of her early days, which she seemed to have left so far behind her.
Certainly the essays before us indicated no such future. One of them, indeed, dealing with the Natural History of German Life, proves that George Eliot had observed as closely the English peasant as her author Riehl had studied the German species. Take the following picture:—
'Observe a company of haymakers. When you see them at a distance, tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the waggon creeps slowly with its increasing burthen over the meadow, and the bright green space which tells of work done gets larger and larger, you pronounce the scene
