in money.  These subscriptions were continued while the articles were in progress, and amounted to a considerable sum.  In 1854 these essays were republished in Bohn’s Scientific Library under the title of Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences.  The Leader was ably conducted, but it was radical and outspoken, and did not receive the support it deserved.  In 1854 his connection with it came to an end.

While connected with The Leader, Lewes had turned his attention to Goethe, and made a thorough study of his life and opinions.  After spending many months in Weimar, and as a result of his studies in Germany, he published in 1855 his Life and Works of Goethe.  It was carefully re-written in 1873, and the substance of it was given in an abbreviated and more popular form a few years later.  This has usually been accepted as the best book about Goethe written in English.  Mr. Anthony Trollope expresses the usual opinion when he says, “As a critical biography of one of the great heroes of literature it is almost perfect.  It is short, easily understood by common readers, singularly graphic, exhaustive, and altogether devoted to the subject.”  On the other hand, Bayard Taylor said that “Lewes’s entertaining apology hardly deserves the name of a biography.”  It is an opinionated book, controversial, egotistic, and unnecessarily critical.  It was written less with the purpose of interpreting Goethe to the English reader than of giving expression to Lewes’s own views on many subjects.  His chapters on Goethe’s science and on his realism are marked by an extreme dogmatism.  The poetic and religious side of Goethe’s nature he was incapable of understanding, and always misrepresents, as he did that side of his nature which allied Goethe with Schiller and the other idealists.  Lewes was always polemical, had some theory to champion, some battle to fight.  He did not write for the sake of the subject, but because the subject afforded an arena of battle for the theories to the advocacy of which he gave his life.

With the completion of his Life of Goethe, Lewes turned his attention more than ever to physiological studies, though he had continued to give them much attention in the midst of his other pursuits.  In 1858 appeared his Seaside Studies, in which he recorded the results of his original investigations at Ilfracombe, Tenby, Scilly Isles and Jersey.  This volume is written in a plain descriptive style, containing many interesting accounts of scenery and adventure, explanations of the methods of study of animal life at the seashore, how experiments are carried on, the results of these special studies, and much of controversy with other observers.  It combines science and description in a happy manner.  Another result of his physiological studies was a paper “On the Spinal Cord as a Centre of Sensation and Volition,” read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1858.  This was followed the next