VII.
GEORGE ELIOT.
The illustrious author of Adam Bede and Middlemarch was born November 22, 1819, at South Farm, in the parish of Colton, Warwickshire. To this county, the birthplace of the greatest man who ever wrote, and of the greatest woman who ever wrote, we might well apply the words of Charlotte Brontë when she speaks of her heroine as having been reared in "the healthy heart of England." Warwickshire is a small county in the center of the island, hemmed in by such English shires as Oxford, Leicester, and Stafford; but whatever in England is most English, whether men, nature, towns, homes, traditions, relics, usages; whether we seek the England of romance, the England of history, or the England of industry, we find it in Warwickshire. Birmingham is there, but Kenilworth also. There are Warwick Castle, and Alcester, the seat of the needle manufacture. Dr. Arnold's Rugby is there. It is a land of ancient forest and broad meadows, where the beeves of Justice Shallow fattened. Rosalind wandered in its forest of Arden, and melancholy Jaques soliloquized, and one of his merry companions sang:
Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither;
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather."
