the translation the Westminster Review had this word of praise to offer:  “We can testify that the translator has achieved a very tough work with remarkable spirit and fidelity.  The author, though indeed a good writer, could hardly have spoken better had his country and language been English.  The work has evidently fallen into the hands of one who has not only effective command of both languages, but a familiarity with the subject-matter of theological criticism, and an initiation into its technical phraseology.”  Another critic said that “whoever reads these volumes without any reference to the German, must be pleased with the easy, perspicuous, idiomatic force of the English style.  But he will be still more satisfied when, on turning to the original, he finds that the rendering is word for word, thought for thought and sentence for sentence.  In preparing so beautiful a rendering as the present, the difficulties can have been neither few nor small in the way of preserving, in various parts of the work, the exactness of the translation, combined with that uniform harmony and clearness of style which impart to the volumes before us the air and the spirit of an original.  A modest and kindly care for his reader’s convenience has induced the translator often to supply the rendering into English of a Greek quotation when there was no corresponding rendering into German in the original.  Indeed, Strauss may well say, as he does in the notice which he writes for this English edition, that, as far as he has examined it, the translation is et accurata et perspicua.”

The book had a successful sale, but Marian Evans received only twenty pounds, and twenty-five copies of the book, for her share of the translation.  A little later she translated Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, receiving fifty pounds for this labor.  It was published in 1854, but the sale was small, and it proved a heavy loss to the publisher.  While translating Strauss she aided a friend interested in philosophical studies (probably Charles Bray) by the translation, for his reading, of the De Deo of Spinoza.  Some years later she completed a translation of the more famous Ethica of the same thinker.  It was not published, probably because there was at that time so little interest in Spinoza.

The execution of such work as this, and all of it done in the most creditable and accurate manner, indicates the thoroughness of Marian Evans’ scholarship.  Though she doubtless was somewhat inclined to accept the opinions she thus helped to diffuse, yet Miss Simcox tells us that “the translation of Strauss and the translation of Spinoza were undertaken, not by her own choice but at the call of friendship; in the first place to complete what some one else was unable to continue, and in the second to make the philosopher she admired accessible to a friendly phrenologist who did not read Latin.  At all times she regarded translation as a work that should be undertaken as