ious and religious parents,
who appreciated the advantage of education, Miss Evans was allowed to
make the best of her circumstances. We have few details of her early
life on which we can accurately rely. She was not an egotist, and did
not leave an autobiography like Trollope, or reminiscences like Carlyle;
but she has probably portrayed herself, in her early aspirations, as
Madame de Stael did, in the characters she has created. The less we know
about the personalities of very distinguished geniuses, the better it is
for their fame. Shakspeare might not seem so great to us if we knew his
peculiarities and infirmities as we know those of Voltaire, Rousseau,
and Carlyle; only such a downright honest and good man as Dr. Johnson
can stand the severe scrutiny of after times and "destructive
criticism."

It would appear that Miss Evans was sent to a school in Nuneaton before
she was ten, and afterwards to a school in Coventry, kept by two
excellent Methodist ladies,--the Misses Franklin,--whose lives and
teachings enabled her to delineate Dinah Morris. As a school-girl we are
told that she had the manners and appearance of a woman. Her hair was
pale brown, worn in ringlets; her figure was slight, her head massive,
her mouth large, her jaw square, her complexion pale, her eyes
gray-blue, and her voice rich and musical. She lost her mother at
sixteen, when she most needed maternal counsels, and afterwards lived
alone with her father until 1841, when they removed to Foleshill, near
Coventry. She was educated in the doctrines of the Low or Evangelical
Church, which are those of Calvin,--although her Calvinism was early
modified by the Arminian views of Wesley. At twelve she taught a class
in a Sunday-school; at twenty she wrote poetry, as most bright girls do.
The head-master of the grammar school in Coventry taught her Greek and
Latin, while Signor Brizzi gave her lessons in Italian, French, and
German; she also played on the piano with great skill. Her learning and
accomplishments were so unusual, and gave such indication of talent,
that she was received as a friend in the house of Mr. Charles Bray, of
Coventry, a wealthy ribbon-merchant, where she saw many eminent literary
men of the progressive school, among whom were James Anthony Froude and
Ralph Waldo Emerson.

At what period the change in her religious views took place I have been
unable to ascertain,--probably between the ages of twenty-one and
twenty-five, by which