"There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears; who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society much as the son of Imlah came before the throned kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital--a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of _Vanity Fair_ admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek-fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time, they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead. "Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognized; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day: as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things." Now, into this field of beneficent activity which _The Novel_ has created, comes in 1857 George Eliot: comes with no more noise than that of a snow-flake falling on snow, yet--as I have said, and as I wish now to show with some detail--comes as an epoch-maker, both by virtue of the peculiar mission she undertakes and of the method in which she carries it out. What then is that peculiar mission? In the very first of these stories, _Amos Barton_, she announces it quite explicitly, though it cannot be supposed at all consciously. Before quoting the passage, in order that you may at once take the full significance of it, let me remind you of a certain old and grievous situation as between genius and the commonplace person. For a long time every most pious thinker must have found one of the mysteries most trying to his faith to be the strange and apparently unjustifiable partiality of God's spiritual gifts as between man and man. For example, we have a genius (say) once in a hundred years; but this hundred years represents three generations of the whole world; that is to say, here are three thousand million commonplace people to one genius. Now, with all the force of this really inconceivable numerical majority, the cry arises, How monstrous! Here are three thousand millions of people to eat, sleep, die, and rot into oblivion, and but one man is to have such faculty as may conquer death, win fame, and live beyond the worms!