THE RADICAL. BUSTON 1794. LIBRARY GEORGE ELIOT. "Upon the midlands now the industrious muse doth fall, The shires which we the heart of England well may call. My native country thou, which so brave spirits hast bred, DRAYTON: Polyoìbion. HARPER'S LIBRARY EDITION. NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE. III. FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL. IV. SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE and SILAS MARNER. HARPER & BROTHERS will send any of the above volumes by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt of 75 cents. FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL. INTRODUCTION. FIVE-AND-THIRTY years ago the glory had not yet departed from the old coach-roads: the great road-side inns were still brilliant with well-polished tankards, the smiling glances of pretty barmaids, and the repartees of jocose hostlers; the mail still announced itself by the merry notes of the horn; the hedge-cutter or the rick-thatcher might still know the exact hour by the unfailing yet otherwise meteoric apparition of the pea-green Tally-ho or the yellow Independent; and elderly gentlemen in pony-chaises, quartering nervously to make way for the rolling, swinging swiftness, had not ceased to remark that times were finely changed since they used to see the pack-horses and hear the tinkling of their bells on this very highway. In those days there were pocket-boroughs, a Birmingham unrepresented in Parliament and compelled to make strong representations out of it, unrepealed corn-laws, three-and-sixpenny letters, a brawny and many-breeding pauperism, and other departed evils; but there were some pleasant things, too, which have also departed. Non omnia grandior ætas quæ fugiamus habet, says the wise goddess: you have not the best of it in all things, oh youngsters! the elderly man has his enviable memories, and not the least of them is the memory of a long journey in midspring or autumn on the outside of a stage-coach. Poster ity may be shot, like a bullet, through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow, oldfashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory. The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory O! Whereas the happy outside passenger seated on the box from the dawn to the gloaming gathered enough stories of English life, enough of English labors in town and country, enough aspects of earth and sky, to make episodes for a modern Odyssey. Suppose only that his journey took him through that central plain, watered at one extremity by the Avon, at the other by the Trent. As the morning silvered the meadows with their long lines of bushy willows marking the water-courses, or burnished the golden corn-ricks clustered near the long roofs of some midland homestead, he saw the full-uddered cows driven from their pasture to the early milking. Perhaps it was the shepherd, head-servant of the farm, who drove them, his sheep-dog following with a heedless, unofficial air as of a beadle in undress. The shepherd with a slow and slouching walk, timed by the walk of grazing beasts, moved aside, as if unwillingly, throwing out a monosyllabic hint to his cattle; his glance, accustomed to rest on things very near the earth, seemed to lift itself with difficulty to the coachman. Mail or stage coach for him belonged to that mysterious distant system of things called "Gover❜ment," which, whatever it might be, was no business of his, any more than the most outlying nebula or the coal-sacks of the southern hemisphere: his solar system was the parish; the master's temper and the casualties of lambing-time were his region of storms. He cut his bread and bacon with his pocket-knife, and felt no bitterness except in the matter of pauper laborers and the bad-luck that sent contrarious seasons and the sheeprot. He and his cows were soon left behind, and the homestead too, with its pond overhung by elder-trees, its untidy |