Or one might have prescribed for her America where the knottiest social and moral problems disappear unaccountably before a certain new energy of individual growth which is continually conquering new points of view from which to regard the world. At the time to which we have now brought her history, Marian Evans would seem to have been a singularly engaging person. She was small in stature and her face was what would be called plain here; but she was widely read, master of several languages, a good talker and listener: and beyond all, every current of testimony runs towards a certain intensity and loving fire which pervaded her and which endowed her with irresistible magnetic attraction for all sensitive souls that came near her. Her love for home matters, and for the spot of earth where she had been born, her gentle affection for animals; how the Bible and Thomas à Kempis were her favorite books, these and a thousand womanly traits I hope to bring out as we study some of her greater works,--for with all her reputed reserve I find scarcely any writer so sincerely communicative and so frankly desirous of sympathy on the part of her reader as George Eliot. In the next article I shall ask leave to present you with some pictures of the stage at which English novel-writing has arrived under the recent hands of Scott, Thackeray and Dickens when George Eliot is timidly offering her first manuscript to Blackwood's; and I shall then offer some quotations from these first three stories--particularly from _Janet's Repentance_ which seems altogether the most important of the three--and shall attempt to show distinctly what were the main new features of wit, of humor, of doctrine, and of method which were thus introduced into literature, especially in connection with similar features which about this same time were being imparted by Mrs. Browning.