Morning journal and courier., 1892-05-07
wAKEMAN,s wANDERINGs.

I wAKEMAN'S wANDERINGS. l George Eliol,s Girlhood Home-Grff l the Farm Home of Literature Foremost Woman - The Regio ssGerge Eliot Land" as Well a Shakespeare's Country-Extraordi nary Relatives and Many Child hood Friends Still Living.
 BEDwoRTH, England, April 23.
 1s tho Editor of the JsuRSAl AID COURIER:
 It is not long ago that one of the nobles
 of American women said to me:
 eff there is any earthly influence tha
 might repress the presumption, impudenc
 and immodesty of that rapidly-increasinl
 class of my countrywomen who seem pos
 sessed of a mad craze to unsex themselve
 for the pitiable reward of temporary pub
 lie recognition or notoriety, it would be
 genuine study of the genius of George Fl
 tot, coupled with pilgrimage to the local
 ities upon which her everyday life as [
 maid and woman left the grand impress
 of their personal worth.
 ''This much of an object-lesson would
 be learned-if such women are capable oi
 receiving grave and serious instruction
 as would also result from g like study oi
 the genius of Harriet Ms-tineau, the Cary
 nisters, Rosa Bonheur, Dinah Mulock Craik
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte
 Bronte, and all other women who are td
 remain among the immortals: That where
 genius has been the original gift of wo-
 man, in the precise degree that has been eventually achieved and accorded, has that
 woman shrunk from offensive exhibitions of her own personality and importance. Another as impressive truth would have logical revealment. Where any woman charges upon the public with demands for its attention and homage. in the same de- gree of her insistance and clamor will it, in time, be withheld and prove her doom to merited oblivion"
 However this may be, remembering George Eliot's works which, in its hold upon the intellect and heart of all Eng fish speaking people, is instinctively grouped with that of Scott and Shakes peare, and her grand, strong, plain face, which you instinctively group with those of Dante, Bronte, Savonarola and Liszt, you come to the pleasant region where she grew to her full stature of person and gen. jus with something akin to the same inde- fnabls feeling of dreamful unreality, touched with reverence and almost hushed with awe, as when you tread the quaint streets of old Stratford, close to the shrine of the immortal bard of Avon.
 Indeed the Shakespeare country is truly George Eiiot's land. Stratford, Warwick, Coventry and Nuneaton all lie in direct line from the southwest to the northeast boundaries of Warwickshire. One of the finest highways in England. elm shaded for more than half it's length, them all. Eliot's Warwickshire was the Arden of Shakespeare. The same Avon smiled back from its murmuring waters upon them both. The same bill lowy hills, gentle slopes and sunny val eys gave both their inspiration and imag- sry. Their hearts warmed to the same peasantry. In the subtle delineation of these Eliot was to the early Victorian age, at least in a degree, what Shakespeare was to the early Elizabethan. And Shakes peare's birthplace and grave at Stratford are not thirty miles distant from George Eliot's girlhood home.
 It lies on the olden highway between Coventry and Nuneaton. These towns are put nine miles apart. Bedworth, a sleepy old pit village, is midway between; and about half way from Bedworth to Nunea- ton, near Arbury Hall, the seat of the is Griff, a fine old English farm home and stealing, belonging to the great Arbury estates now as when George Eliot's (Mary Ann EvansD baby eyes first ooked upon the great frs, cedars, elms md Times which shade this old and ample ,tone structure. In this house of many yables and tiny-paned bow windows George Eliot lived from March, 1920, when she vas & babe but four months old, until March, 1S41, when her family removed rom Griff to Foleshill. Coventry, a peri ,d of twenty-one years. These were the wenty one years in which were nurtured nd matured all those bodily, heart and mental forces which gave her the highest ,lace in literature of any woman that ever ived.
 Her father, Robert Evans, was a tenant # MT. Francis Newdigate, at Kirk Hal em, Derbyshire. On the death of old Sir Roger Newdigate the Arbury estate in came to Francis Newdigate or life, and Robert Evans accompanied Jim to Arbury as his tenant and agent. By a first wife there had been two chill lren. Their mother died in 1909. Their ather married Christiana Pearson in 1913. Three children were born of this union Ihristians, in 1914; Isaac, in 1916; and Nary Ann George ElioD in 1910, at the South Farm" Arbury, which had been given the father temporarily. Cross, in lis biography of George Eliot, transcribes rom all old diary of the father where it lad been penned in his own handwriting:
 November g, 1S19.-Mary Ann Evans vas born at Arbury Farm (this was ''South Fsrm," Arbury) at five o'clock this morn ng."
 It was St. Cecilia's day. It is also of re- ,ord that the child was baptized in the an- ,ient church of Chilvers Cotton, which :ears it's crumbling Norman tower over a landscape that will strongly remind you of he moors about Haworth, where the sis :ers Bronte struggled nearly all their lives n pathetic silence. This quaint old pile midway between the Griff farmhouse and and the half dozen houses un- Ter it's caves, is the Shepperton of Amos Barton"
 The three Evans children, then, most and longest associated with Grif were the LuTe0 DOTu upOu buo ATDuTy eStaUeS. Christiana married a surgeon named Clark, of Meriden, Warkickshire, and died in 1859. George Eliot died in 1880. Isaac, as learned after arrival here, who had re- mained at Grif and succeeded the novel, st's father as it's tenant and the Newdi- yates' agent, suddenly died in his chair on returning from service at Chilvers Cotton church, in October, 1890.
 His children, nephews and nieces of George Eliot, are four in number. It is an unpleasant but truthful statement that while they command certain deterence on account of relationship without which their own small affairs would never have reached the confines of their little parish, they are unlovable and unloved by the few of quality and the thousands of lnwly around them. They are stern, cold, mi serly money grabbers, all; offensively con- scious of their radisted importance and churlish and repellsnt to all who bring @ whole-hesrted reverence to spot made luminous by the presence of mighty soul.
 One dauohter A maiden lady of severe