GEORGE ELIOT'S YOUTH.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3169, 25 August 1881, Page 4

GEORGE ELIOT'S YOUTH.

Somewhere about 1827 a friendly neighbor lent' Waverly' to an elderly sister of little Mary Evans. It was returned before the child had read to the end, and in her distress at the loss of the fascinating volume she began to write out the story as far as she had read ifc for herself, beginning naturally where the story begins with. Waverly's ad-veiuui-es at Tully Veolan, and continuing until the sxirprised elders were moved to get her the book again. Ella divided her childish allegiance with Scott, and she remembered fastening with singular pleasure upon an extract in some stray almanac from the essay in commemoration of ' Captain JackSon,' and his 'slender ration of single Gloucester,'' and proverbs in favor of cheeserind. This is an extreme example of the general rule that a wise child's taste in literature is sounder than adults generally venture to believe. Not many years later we may imagine her a growing girl at school. Almost on the outskirts of the old town of Coventry, toward the railway station, the house may still be seen, itself an old-fashioned, fivewindowed Queen Anne sort of a dwelling, with a shell-shaped cornice over the door, with an old timbered cottage facing it, and near adjoining a quaint brick and timber building, with an oriel window thrown out upon oak pillars. Between forty and fifty years ago, Methodist ladies kept the school, and the name of ' little mamma,' given by her schoolfellows, is a proof that already something was to be seen of the maternal air which characterised her in later years, and perhaps more especially in intercourse with her own sex. Prayer meetings were in vogue among tho girl?, following the example of their elders, and while taking, no doubt, a leading part in these, she used to suffer much self-reproach about her coldness and inability to be carried away with the same enthusiasm as others. At the same time, nothing was further from her nature than any sceptical inclination, and she used to pounce with avidity upon any approach to argumentative theology within her reach, carrying Paley's ' Evidences ' up to her bedroom, and devouring it as she lay upon the floor alone. A mind like hers must have prayed disastrously upon itself during the years of comparative solitude in which she lived at Foleshill, had it not been for that inexhaustible source of delight in every kind of intellectual acquisition. Languages, music, literature, science and philosophy interested her alike ; it was early in this period that in the course of a walk with a friend she paused and clasped her hands with a wild aspiration that she must live ' to reconcile the philosophy of Locke and Kant.' Years afterwards she remembered the very turn of the road where she had spoken it. Before she was 20 she wrote verses like other youths, but the silence (as to original production (which lasted more than fifteen years after that date was owing to a characteristic mixture of intense ambition and diffidence. She did not choose herself 5 in#eed, she thought it wrong to Dull the world's sense with mediocrity. wEdifch SimcoXj in the Nineteenth Century.