r, and the low, sweet
voice, with its peculiar mannerism of speaking--which by the way wore off
in after years--would give utterance to thoughts so rich and singular that
converse with Miss Evans, even in those days, made speech with other people
seem flat and common. Miss Evans was an exemplification of the fact that a
great genius is not an exceptional, capricious product of nature, but a
thing of slow, laborious growth, the fruit of industry and the general
culture of the faculties. At Foleshill, with ample means and leisure, her
real education began. She acquired French, German and Italian from Signor
Brezzi. An acquaintance with Hebrew was the result of her own unaided
efforts. From Mr. Simms, the veteran organist of St. Michaels, Coventry,
she received lessons in music, although it was her own fine musical sense
which made her in after years an admirable pianoforte player. Nothing once
learned escaped her marvellous memory; and her keen sympathy with all human
feelings, in which lay the secret of her power of discriminating character,
caused a constant fund of knowledge to flow into her treasure-house from
the social world about her."

Marian Evans early showed an unusual interest in religious subjects. Her
parents belonged to the Established Church, while other members of the
family were zealous Methodists. Religion was a subject which occupied much
of their attention, and several of them were engaged in one way and another
in its inculcation. Marian was an attentive listener to the sermons
preached in the parish church, and at the age of twelve was teaching in a
Sunday school held in a cottage near her father's house. Up to the age of
eighteen she was a most devoted believer in Christianity, and her zeal was
so great that Evangelicalism came to represent her mode of thought and
feeling. She was a somewhat rigid Calvinist and full of pious enthusiasm.
After her removal to Coventry, where her reading was of a wider range and
her circle of friends increased, doubts gradually sprang up in her mind. In
a letter written to Miss Sara Hennell she gave a brief account of her
religious experiences at this period. In it she described an aunt, Mrs.
Elizabeth Evans, who was a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah
Morris in _Adam Bede_.

There was hardly any intercourse between my father's family, resident
in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and our family--few and far-between
visits of (to my childish feelin