It was then that the friendly attachment between Miss Evans and Mr. Lewes began, which ripened into love and ended in a scandal.  Mr. Lewes was as homely as Wilkes, and was three years older than Miss Evans,—­a very bright, witty, versatile, learned, and accomplished man; a brilliant talker, novelist, playwright, biographer, actor, essayist, and historian, whose “Life of Goethe” is still the acknowledged authority in Germany itself, as Carlyle’s “Frederic the Great” is also regarded.  But his fame has since been eclipsed by that of the woman he pretended to call his wife, and with whom (his legal wife being still alive) he lived in open defiance of the seventh Commandment and the social customs of England for twenty years.  This unfortunate connection, which saddened the whole subsequent life of Miss Evans, and tinged all her writings with the gall of her soul, excluded her from that high conventional society which it has been the aim of most ambitious women to enter.  But this exclusion was not, perhaps, so great an annoyance to Miss Evans as it would have been to Hannah More, since she was not fitted to shine in general society, especially if frivolous, and preferred to talk with authors, artists, actors, and musical geniuses, rather than with prejudiced, pleasure-seeking, idle patricians, who had such attractions for Addison, Pope, Mackintosh, and other lights of literature, who unconsciously encouraged that idolatry of rank and wealth which is one of the most uninteresting traits of the English nation.  Nor would those fashionable people, whom the world calls “great,” have seen much to attract them in a homely and unconventional woman whose views were discrepant with the established social and religious institutions of the land.  A class that would not tolerate such a genius as Carlyle, would not have admired Marian Evans, even if the stern etiquette of English life had not excluded her from envied and coveted reunions; and she herself, doubtless, preferred to them the brilliant society which assembled in Mr. Chapman’s parlors to discuss those philosophical and political theories of which Comte was regarded as the high-priest, and his positivism the essence of all progressive wisdom.

How far the gloomy materialism and superficial rationalism of Lewes may have affected the opinions of Miss Evans we cannot tell.  He was her teacher and constant companion, and she passed as his wife; so it is probable that he strengthened in her mind that dreary pessimism which appeared in her later writings.  Certain it is that she paid the penalty of violating a fundamental moral law, in the neglect of those women whose society she could have adorned, and possibly in the silent reproaches of conscience, which she portrayed so vividly in the characters of those heroines who struggled ineffectually in the conflict between duty and passion.  True, she accepted the penalty without complaint, and labored to the end of her days, with masculine