would lead her, particularly with the encouragement of example, to push any strong tendency to an extreme. Deeply influenced by the religious views of Miss Lewis, she came under other and still stronger tendencies from thirteen to sixteen, which period she spent at another school kept by the daughters of a Baptist minister in Coventry, where, we learn, she became a leader of prayer-meetings amongst the girls. When she was sixteen she lost her mother, and returned home to keep house for her father, the elder sister having married about that time; and now it happened that the practice of her religious principles, bordering on asceticism, placed her in antagonism with her brother. Isaac was fond of sports and pleasures, and had, moreover, imbibed strong High Church views. His sister not only opposed him with argument, but with a strictness of life which must have looked like a reproach. As she says of Maggie Tulliver, "she threw some exaggeration and wilfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even into her self-renunciation." To her "the pursuit of pleasure was a snare, dress was vanity, society was a danger." In her first visit to London with her brother, when she was eighteen, she would not accompany him to the theatres, but spent all her evenings alone reading. To the evangelical religion she had (she avowed at a later time) sacrificed the cultivation of her intellect, and a proper regard to personal appearance. "I used," she said, "to go about like an owl, to the great disgust of my brother; and I would have denied him what I now see to have been quite lawful amusements." A curious confirmation of what she says of sacrificing the cultivation of her intellect, is found in reading her letters of this period to Miss Lewis. Nothing connected with George Eliot can be more curious, for one who remembers what her formed style was – how studiously truthful in rendering the subject-matter, how careful in the exclusion of conventionalities – than to mark how she adopted the very phraseology of her religious friends. Of the marriage of an acquaintance she writes: –
"I must believe that those are happiest who are not fermenting themselves by engaging in projects for earthly bliss, who are considering this life merely a pilgrimage, a scene calling for diligence and watchfulness, not for repose and amusement. I do not deny that there may be many who can partake with a high degree of zest of all the lawful enjoyments the world can offer, and yet live in near communion with their God – who can warmly love the creature, and yet be careful that the Creator maintains His supremacy in their hearts; but I confess that in my short experience and narrow sphere of action I have never been able to attain to this. I find, as Dr Johnson said respecting his wine, total abstinence much easier than moderation. ... I have highly enjoyed Hannah More's letters: the contemplation of so blessed a character as hers is very salutary. ... Oh that we could live only for eternity! that we could realise its nearness! I know you do not love quotations, so I will not give you one; but if you do not distinctly remember it, do turn to the passage in Young's 'Infidel Reclaimed,' beginning, 'O vain, vain, vain all else eternity,' and do love the lines for my sake. ...
"I have just begun the life of Wilberforce, and I am expecting a rich treat from it. There is a similarity, if I may compare myself with such a man, between his temptations, or rather besetments, and my own, that makes his experience very interesting to me. Oh that I might be made as useful in my lowly and obscure station as he was in the exalted one assigned to him! I feel myself to be a mere cumberer of the ground. May the
