quiet way, and have a great deal of deep, silent joy;
but few authors, I suppose, who have had a real success, have known
less of the flush and the sensations of triumph that are talked of as
the accompaniments of success. I often think of my dreams when I was
four or five and twenty. I thought then how happy fame would make
me.... I am assured now that _Adam Bede_ was worth writing,--worth
living through those long years to write. But now it seems impossible
that I shall ever write anything so good and true again." Up to this
time the world did not know who George Eliot was; but as a man by
the name of Liggins laid claim to the authorship, and tried to borrow
money for his needs because Blackwood would not pay him, the real name
of the author had to be divulged.

Five thousand copies of _Adam Bede_ were sold the first two weeks, and
sixteen thousand the first year. So excellent was the sale that Mr.
Blackwood sent her four thousand dollars in addition to the first
four. The work was soon translated into French, German, and Hungarian.
Mr. Lewes' _Physiology of Common Life_ was now published, but it
brought little pecuniary return.

The reading was carried on as usual by the two students. The _Life
of George Stephenson_; the _Electra_ of Sophocles; the _Agamemnon_ of
Aeschylus, Harriet Martineau's _British Empire in India_; and _History
of the Thirty Years' Peace_; Beranger, _Modern Painters_, containing
some of the finest writing of the age; Overbech on Greek art; Anna
Mary Howitt's book on Munich; Carlyle's _Life of Frederick the Great_;
Darwin's _Origin of Species_; Emerson's _Man the Reformer_, "which
comes to me with fresh beauty and meaning"; Buckle's _History of
Civilization_; Plato and Aristotle.

An American publisher now offered her six thousand dollars for a book,
but she was obliged to decline, for she was writing the _Mill on the
Floss_, in 1860, for which Blackwood gave her ten thousand dollars
for the first edition of four thousand copies, and Harper & Brothers
fifteen hundred dollars for using it also. Tauchnitz paid her five
hundred for the German reprint.

She said: "I am grateful and yet rather sad to have finished; sad that
I shall live with my people on the banks of the Floss no longer. But
it is time that I should go, and absorb some new life and gather fresh
ideas." They went at once to Italy, where they spent several months in
Florence, Venice, and Rome.

In the former city she made her stu