If you should be wandering meditatively along the banks of some tiny brook, so narrow that you can leap across it without effort, so quiet in its singing its loudest tinkle cannot be heard in the next field, carrying upon its bosom no craft that would draw more water than the curving leaf of a wild-rose floating down stream, too small in volume to dream of a mill-wheel and turning nothing more practical than maybe a piece of violet petal in a little eddy off somewhere,--if, I say, you should be strolling alongside such a brook and should see it suddenly expand, without the least intermediate stage, into a mighty river, turning a thousand great wheels for man's profit as it swept on to the sea, and offering broad highway and favorable currents to a thousand craft freighted with the most precious cargoes of human aspirations; you would behold the aptest physical semblance of that spiritual phenomenon which we witnessed at our last meeting, when in tracing the quiet and mentally wayward course of demure Marian Evans among the suave pastorals of her native Warwickshire, we came suddenly upon the year 1857 when her first venture in fiction--_The Scenes from Clerical Life_ appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and magically enlarged the stream of her influence from the diameter of a small circle of literary people in London to the width of all England. At this point it seems interesting now to pause a moment, to look about and see exactly what network English fiction had done since its beginning, only about a century before; to note more particularly what were the precise gains to humanity which Thackeray and Dickens had poured in just at this time of 1857; and thus to differentiate a clear view of the actual contribution which George Eliot was now beginning to make to English life and thought. It is not a pleasant task, however instructive, to leave off looking at a rose and cast one's contemplation down to the unsavory muck in which its roots are imbedded. This, however, is what one must do when one passes from the many-petalled rose of George Eliot's fiction to the beginning of the English novel. This beginning was as curious as it was unlooked for by the people engaged in it. In the year 1740, a book in two volumes called _Pamela: or The Reward of Virtue_, was printed, in which Samuel Richardson took what seems to have been the first revolutionary departure from the wild and complex romances--such for example, as Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_--which had formed the nearest approach to the modern novel until then. At this time Richardson was fifty years old, and probably the last man in England who would have been selected as likely to write an epoch-making book of any description.