(Distance walked twenty-seven miles.)

Thursday, November 2nd.

In our early days we used to be told there was only one man in Manchester, which fact was true if we looked at the name; in the same way we were told there was but one nun in Nuneaton, but the ruins of the nunnery suggested that there must have been quite a number there in the past ages.  We had seen many monasteries in our travels, but only one nunnery, and that was at York; so convent life did not seem to have been very popular in the North country, the chorus of a young lady’s song of the period perhaps furnishing the reason why: 

[Illustration:  “GEORGE ELLIOT.”]

  Then I won’t be a Nun,
  And I shan’t be a Nun;
  I’m so fond of pleasure
  That I cannot be a Nun.

The nuns had of course disappeared and long since been forgotten, but other women had risen to take their places in the minds and memories of the people of Nuneaton, foremost amongst whom was Mary Ann Evans, who was born about the year 1820 at the South Farm, Arbury, whither her father, belonging to the Newdegate family, had removed from Derbyshire to take charge of some property in Warwickshire.  “George Eliot” has been described as “the greatest woman writer in English literature,” and as many of her novels related mainly to persons and places between Nuneaton and Coventry, that district had been named by the Nuneaton people “The Country of George Eliot.” Scenes of Clerical Life was published in 1858, and The Mill on the Floss in 1860, and although the characters and places are more difficult to locate than those in Adam Bede, the “Bull Hotel” at Nuneaton has been identified as the “Red Lion” in her novel, where Mr. Dempster, over his third glass of brandy and water, would overwhelm a disputant who had beaten him in argument, with some such tirade as:  “I don’t care a straw, sir, either for you or your encyclopaedia; a farrago of false information picked up in a cargo of waste paper.  Will you tell me, sir, that I don’t know the origin of Presbyterianism?  I, sir, a man known through the county; while you, sir, are ignored by the very fleas that infest the miserable alley in which you were bred!”

[Illustration:  SOUTH FARM, ARBURY, THE BIRTHPLACE OF “GEORGE ELIOT”]

We left the “Newdegate Arms” at Nuneaton early in the morning, on our way to Lutterworth, our next object of interest, and passed by the village of Hartshill, where Michael Drayton was born in 1563.  He was a lyric poet of considerable fame and a friend of Shakespeare.  His greatest work, Polyolbion, a poetic description of different parts of England, was published in 1613.  He became Poet Laureate, and at his death, in 1631, was buried in Westminster Abbey.