While it is true that the publication of _Adam Bede_ enables us--as stated in the last lecture--to fix George Eliot as already at the head of English novel writers in 1859, I should add that the effect of the book was not so well defined upon the public of that day. The work was not an immediate popular success; and even some of the authoritative critics, instead of recognizing its greatness with generosity, went pottering about to find what existing authors this new one had most likely drawn her inspiration from. But _The Mill on the Floss_, which appeared in April, 1860, together with some strong and generous reviews of _Adam Bede_, which had meantime appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and in the _London Times_, quickly carried away the last vestige of this suspense, and _The Mill on the Floss_ presently won for itself a popular audience and loving appreciation which appear to have been very gratifying to George Eliot herself. This circumstance alone would make the book an interesting one for our present special study; but the interest is greatly heightened by the fact--a fact which I find most positively stated by those who most intimately knew her--that the picture of girlhood which occupies so large a portion of the first part of the book, is, in many particulars, autobiographic. The title originally chosen for this work by George Eliot was _Sister Maggie_, from which we may judge the prominence she intended to give to the character of Maggie Tulliver. After the book was finished, however, this title was felt to be, for several reasons, insufficient. It was a happy thought of Mr. Blackwood's to call the book _The Mill on the Floss_; and George Eliot immediately adopted his suggestion to that effect. There is, too, a third reason why this particular work offers some peculiar contributions to the main lines of thought upon which these lectures have been built. As I go on to read a page here and there merely by way of recalling the book and the actual style to you, you will presently find that the interest of the whole has for the time concentrated itself upon the single figure of a little wayward English girl some nine years old, perhaps alone in a garret in some fit of childish passion, accusing the Divine order of things as to its justice or mercy, crudely and inarticulately enough yet quite as keenly after all as our _Prometheus_, either according to Æschylus or Shelley. As I pass along rapidly bringing back to you these pictures of Maggie's girlish despairs, I beg you to recall the first scenes which were set before you from the _Prometheus_, to bear those in mind along with these, to note how Æschylus--whom we have agreed to consider as a literary prototype, occupying much the same relation to his age as George Eliot does to ours--in stretching _Prometheus_ upon the bare Caucasian rock and lacerating him with the just lightnings of outraged Fate, is at bottom only studying with a ruder apparatus the