when a zealous reviewer proclaimed her the greatest novelist in England,
the sage of Concord said something that sounded like "I told you so."

Miss Evans had made visits to London from time to time with her Coventry
friends. When twenty-eight years old, after one such visit to London, she
came back to the country tired and weary, and wrote this most womanly
wish: "My only ardent desire is to find some feminine task to discharge;
some possibility of devoting myself to some one and making that one
purely and calmly happy."

But now her father was dead and her income was very scanty. She did
translating, and tried the magazines with articles that generally came
back respectfully declined.

Then an offer came as sub-editor of the "Westminster Review." It was
steady work and plenty of it, and this was what she desired. She went to
London and lived in the household of her employer, Mr. Chapman. Here she
had the opportunity of meeting many brilliant people: Carlyle and his
"Jeannie Welsh," the Martineaus, Grote, Mr. and Mrs. Mill, Huxley,
Mazzini, Louis Blanc. Besides these were two young men who must not be
left out when we sum up the influences that evolved this woman's genius.

She was attracted to Herbert Spencer at once. He was about her age, and
their admiration for each other was mutual. Miss Evans, writing to a
friend in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-two, says, "Spencer is kind, he is
delightful, and I always feel better after being with him, and we have
agreed together that there is no reason why we should not see each other
as often as we wish." And then later she again writes: "The bright side
of my life, after the affection for my old friends, is the new and
delightful friendship which I have found in Herbert Spencer. We see each