It came when, at the age of thirty-six she began to write ‘Amos Barton,’ her first attempt at fiction, and one that fixed her career. The story appeared in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine,’ and was followed by ‘Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story’ and ‘Janet’s Repentance.’ Of the three, ‘Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story’ is perhaps the most finished and artistic; while ‘Amos Barton’ has qualities of humour and tenderness that have not often been equalled. ‘Janet’s Repentance,’ strong though it is, and containing the remarkable sketch of Mr. Tryan, is perhaps less surely attractive. The stories, all three of them, have a particular value as records of an English country life that is rapidly passing away. Moreover, it is country life seen through the medium of a powerful and right-judging personality. It is her intimate and thorough knowledge of big things and small, of literature and damson cheese, enabling her and us to see all round her characters, that provides these characters with their ample background of light and shade. It is well to realise that since George Eliot’s day the fashion of writing, the temper of the modern mind, are quite changed; it is a curious fact that the more sophisticated we become the simpler grows our speech. Nowadays we talk as nearly as we may in words of one syllable. Our style is stripped more and more of its Latinity. Our writers are more and more in love with French methods--with the delicate clearness of short phrases in which every word tells; with the rejection of all intellectual ambulations round about a subject. To the fanatics of this modern method the style of George Eliot appears strange, impossible. It does not occur to them that her method has virtues which lack to theirs. They may give us a little laboured masterpiece of art in which the vital principle is wanting. George Eliot was great because she gave us passages from life as it was lived in her day which will be vital so long as they are sympathetically read. George Eliot can be simple enough when she goes straight forward with her narrative, as, for instance, in the scene of Milly Barton’s death; then her English is clear and sweet for she writes from the heart. But take the opening chapter of the same story, and then you find her philosophical Latinity in full swing: the curious and interesting thing being that this otherwise ponderous work, which is quite of a sort to alarm a Frenchman, is entirely suffused by humour, and enshrines moreover the most charming character studies.