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November 6, 1856

 George Eliot (November 22 ,1819 to December 22, 1880), is the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. This Victorian intellectual translated Spinoza, (De Deo in 1844.) Her lover George Henry Lewes was perhaps the first to introduce Baruch Spinoza to English readers. The good fortune of these two intellectuals having found each other, and their happiness together, is a testament to the power of the intellect in addition to the other factors in relationships. And it was a brilliant person who wrote the fiction we excerpt below. 

Scenes of Clerical Life, was submitted to its publisher, John Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine on November 6, 1856. A vignette:

The little old lady took her son's arm with placid pleasure. She could barely reach it so as to rest upon it, but he inclined a little towards her, and accommodated his heavy long-limbed steps to her feeble pace. The cat chose to sun herself too, and walked close beside them, with tail erect, rubbing her sleek sides against their legs,—too well fed to be excited by the twittering birds. The garden was of the grassy, shady kind, often seen attached to old houses in provincial towns; the apple-trees had had time to spread their branches very wide, the shrubs and hardy perennial plants had grown into a luxuriance that required constant trimming to prevent them from intruding on the space for walking. ...

Those of course are the words of George Eliot.

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