In her journal she records on October 22, 1857,--"Began my new novel, _Adam Bede_." For it her publishers offered her £800 for the copyright for four years; later they added £400, and still later Blackwoods, finding a ready sale for their numerous editions, proposed to pay £800 above the original price. And for the appearance of _Romola_ in the _Cornhill Magazine_, Mr. George Smith offered £10,000, but £7000 was accepted. For _Middlemarch_, which appeared in separate publication, that is, independent of a magazine, she received a still larger amount. Middlemarch is considered by many critics her best work. It was very popular from the first. In a letter to John Blackwood, November, 1873, George Eliot writes,--"I had a letter from Mr. Bancroft (the American ambassador at Berlin) the other day, in which he says that everybody in Berlin reads _Middlemarch_. He had to buy two copies for his house, and he found the rector of the university, a stupendous mathematician, occupied with it in the solid part of the day." The public may prefer _Adam Bede_ or _Middlemarch_ but it is reported that George Eliot herself preferred _Silas Marner_. This is the report of Justin McCarthy, who was a frequent visitor on Sunday afternoons at the Priory, the home of George Eliot, where many distinguished visitors, such as Herbert Spencer, Tyndall, and Huxley, loved to gather. "There is a legend," writes Mr. McCarthy, "that George Eliot never liked to talk about her novels. I can only say that she started the subject with me one day. It was, to be sure, about a picture some painter had sent her, representing a scene in _Silas Marner_, and she called my attention to it, and said that of all her novels _Silas Marner_ was her favorite. I ventured to disagree with her, and to say that the _Mill on the Floss_ was my favorite. She entered into the discussion quite genially, just as if she were talking of the works of some stranger, which I think is the very perfection of the manner authors ought to adopt in talking about their books." XLI THE AUTHOR OF "ALICE IN WONDERLAND" It is said that when Victoria, late queen of England, had read _Alice in Wonderland_ she was so pleased that she asked for more of the author's books. They brought her a treatise on logarithms by the Rev. C.L. Dodgson. Lewis Carroll and the Rev. C.L. Dodgson were one and the same person, although they were two dissimilar characters. The one was a popular author of nonsense that delighted children by the hundreds of thousands and the other was a scholarly mathematician.