the latter in his elder phase, for Mr Evans became a first-rate land agent, knowing thoroughly all the branches of that interesting business; as manly, indefatigable, conscientious, clever, and devoted to his calling as the two ideal characters. It is mere commonplace to a thinking person to be told that delineators of character seldom copy from originals after the fashion of portrait-painters. Every novelist must have been worried by simpletons who, incapable of conceiving such a thing as a creative faculty, press for information as to who it was that sat for this or that character, and are much exasperated that the imaginary secret, by promulgating which they hoped to gain great social distinction, should be withheld from them. Few characters could be transferred bodily to a book with advantage to it. As Romeo, according to Juliet, might be cut out in little stars, so a strong individuality like that of Robert Evans may be made to give life and reality to a dozen men of fiction. His wife, pale, energetic, a good housewife and a warm-hearted mother, contained the germs, and more, of the celebrated Mrs Poyser. There was an elder daughter, Chrissey, who married early when Mary Ann was sixteen, and was thenceforward lost to view, though not to memory, for the recollection of the relation between the sisters suggested that between Celia and Dorothea Brooke, and the delineation of Celia was the result of a remembrance of Chrissey, though it could not be called a portrait.
The musing, observant, sensitive, deeply impressionable child lived with this family in Warwickshire, in a house bearing the curious name of Griff, of red brick covered with ivy, and having, like Mr Peyser's, a farmyard, barns, and large dairy. It stood, we are told, in a very flat uninteresting landscape of green fields and hedgerows. But there is something in the smallness of a child which prevents flatness from being uninteresting: to a creature who is too short to see over the smallest fence, and who is hidden by a gooseberry-bush, every knoll is a mountain, every thicket a forest. Moreover, the unattractiveness of the landscape may have intensified the zest derived from the scenes of imagination in Bunyan and Scott; so that, on the whole, the flat fields may have been quite as useful in their way as if the happy valley of Rasselas had stretched from the door.
It need not be said how deep was the impression made on Mary Ann by the scenes and characters which surrounded her childhood, though at that period she saw these only at intervals, for at the age of five she went with her brother to a boarding-school till she was eight, when she was sent with Chrissey to a much larger establishment at Nuneaton, and remained there up to the age of thirteen. In all scholastic studies, then and afterwards, she showed capacity and power unequalled by any of her schoolmates. For accomplishments, she was an enthusiastic musician, and she took a singular pleasure in the study of modern languages. But the circumstance of this period which chiefly concerns the reader is, that at this second school the principal teacher, Miss Lewis, was an ardent evangelical Churchwoman, and became, and continued for years to be, her young pupil's most intimate friend. Always uncommonly susceptible of the influence of those around her, Mary Ann must have been especially so at this early age; and her ardent temper
