An account of her personal traits has been given by Mrs. Lippincott.  “She impressed me,” says this writer, “at first as exceedingly plain, with the massive character of her features, her aggressive jaw and evasive blue eyes.  But as she grew interested and earnest in conversation, a great light flashed over or out of her face, till it seemed transfigured, while the sweetness of her rare smile was something quite indescribable.  But she seemed to me to the last lofty and cold.  I felt that her head was among the stars—­the stars of a wintry night.”  Another American, Miss Kate Field, in writing of the English authors to be seen in Florence half a dozen years after George Eliot began her career, was the first to give an account of this new literary star.  “She is a woman of large frame and fair Saxon coloring.  In heaviness of jaw and height of cheek-bone she greatly resembles a German; nor are her features unlike those of Wordsworth, judging from his pictures.  The expression of her face is gentle and amiable, while her manner is particularly timid and retiring.  In conversation Mrs. Lewes is most entertaining, and her interest in young writers is a trait which immediately takes captive all persons of this class.  We shall not forget with what kindness and earnestness she addressed a young girl who had just begun to handle a pen, how frankly she related her own literary experience, and how gently she suggested advice.  True genius is always allied to humility; and in seeing Mrs. Lewes do the work of a good Samaritan so unobtrusively, we learned to respect the woman as much as we had ever admired the writer.  ‘For years,’ said she to us, ’I wrote reviews because I knew too little of humanity.’”

These sketches by persons who only met her casually have an interest in the illustration of her character; and they may be added to by still another account, written by Mrs. Annie Downs, also an American, in 1879, and describing a visit to George Eliot two years before her death.  “Tall, slender, with a grace most un-English, her face, instead of beauty, possessed a sweet benignity, and at times flashed into absolute brilliancy.  She was older than I had imagined, for her hair, once fair, was gray, and unmistakable lines of care and thought were on the low, broad brow.  But although a pang pierced my heart as I recognized that most of her life was behind her, so intensely did I feel her personality that in a moment I lost sight of her age; it was like standing soul to soul, and beyond the reach of time.  Dressed in black velvet, with point lace on her hair, and repeated at throat and wrists, she made me think at once of Romola and Dorothea Brooke.  She talked of Agassiz, of his museum at Cambridge, of the great natural-history collections at Naples, of Sir Edwin Landseer’s pictures, and with enthusiasm of Mr. Furnival’s Shakspere and Chaucer classes at the Working Men’s College...  She had quaint etchings of some of the monkeys at the zoological gardens, and told me