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It is very interesting, contains true characterization, much of picturesque and dramatic worth; it abounds in enjoyable first-hand observation of a period by-gone yet near enough to have been cognizant to the writer. Her favorite types, too, are in it. Holt, a study of the advanced workman of his day, is another Bede, mutatis mutandis, and quite as truly realized. Both Mr.
Richardson, the father of the modern English novel, was fifty-one years old when "Pamela" was published; Scott was forty-three when "Waverley" appeared; Hawthorne was forty-six when he wrote "The Scarlet Letter"; Thackeray and George Eliot were well on their way to the forties when they completed "Vanity Fair" and "Adam Bede"; and these are the first novels of each writer.
Yet many a stray bird might well be drawn thither by the light and warmth. Bede lived a peaceful, busy life, and when he came to die his end was peaceful too, and his work ceased only with his death. One of his pupils, writing to a friend, tells of these last hours.* *Extracts are from a letter of Cuthbert, afterwards Abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow, to his friend Cuthwin.
Whenever such women write, the constant moral they preach to us is that beauty is a delusion and a snare. This is the moral of Hetty in Adam Bede, and it is in the unsympathetic and cold way in which Hetty is described that one catches glimpses of the sex of the consummate author of the story. She is quite alive to Hetty's plump arms and pretty cheeks.
We are told by St Bede that he made much beautiful verse, being taught much holy lore and making songs so winsome to hear that his teachers themselves learned at his mouth. He also sang concerning the Humanity of Christ and about His Passion and His Ascension, and about the coming of the Holy Ghost, and the teaching of the Apostles.
I replied that the authority of Bede, whose writings are held in high esteem by the whole Latin Church, appeared to me the better.
It is a large chair of oak, traditionally said to have been the seat of the VENERABLE BEDE, the pre-eminent boast of the monastery, a portion only of the church of which establishment remains at Jarrow. The chair is very rudely formed, and, with the exception of the back, is of great age.
One thing the Normans had brought was a liking for history, and soon there sprang up a whole race of chroniclers. They, like Bede, were monks and priests. They lived in monasteries, and wrote in Latin. One after another they wrote, and when one laid down his pen, another took it up. Some of these chroniclers were mere painstaking men who noted facts and dates with care.
"Adam Bede," i. 54. The writer does not seem to be aware that the fools and bores of a book, while they bore the other characters, ought not to bore but to amuse the reader, and that they will become seriously wearisome to him if there be too much of them.
Coal is not mentioned in King Alfred's Bede, in Neckam, in Glanville or in Robert of Gloucester, though the two latter writers speak of the allied mineral, jet, and are very full in their enumeration of the mineral productions of the island.
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