Among the persons who gathered at The Priory on Sunday afternoons there came to be a considerable number of those who were Mrs. Lewes’s devoted disciples.  They hung upon her words, they accepted her views of life, her philosophy became theirs.  That she would have admitted such discipleship existed there is no reason to believe, and it is certain she did not attempt to bring it about or even desire it.  So great, however, was her power of intellect, so noble her personal influence, it was impossible that ardent young natures could refrain from devotion to such genius and speedy acceptance of its teachings.  The richness of her moral and intellectual nature aided largely in this heroine worship, but she impressed herself on other minds because she was so much an individual, because her personality was of a kind to command reverence and devotion.  It was not merely young and impulsive natures who were thus attracted and inspired, for Edith Simcox says that “men and women, old friends and new, persons of her own age and of another generation, the married and the single, impulsive lovers and hard-headed philosophers, nay, even some who elsewhere might have passed for cynics, all classes alike yielded to the attractive force of this rare character, in which tenderness and strength were blended together, and as it were transfused with something that was all her own—­the genius of sweet goodness.”  Perhaps her influence was so great on those it reached because it demanded high and noble life and thought of her disciples.  Her moral ideal was a high one, and she had literary and artistic standards that demanded all the effort of both genius and talent, while her culture was such as to be exacting in its requirements.  So we find Miss Simcox saying that Mrs. Lewes, in her friendships, “had the unconscious exactingness of a full nature.  She was intolerant of a vacuum in the mind or character, and she was indifferent to admiration that did not seem to have its root in fundamental agreement with those principles she held to be most ‘necessary to salvation.’  Where this sympathy existed, her generous affection was given to a fellow-believer, a fellow-laborer, with singularly little reference to the fact that such full sympathy was never unattended with profound love and reverence for herself as a living witness to the truth and power of the principles thus shared.  To love her was a strenuous pleasure; for in spite of the tenderness for all human weakness that was natural to her, and the scrupulous charity of her overt judgments, the fact remained that her natural standard was ruthlessly out of reach, and it was a painful discipline for her friends to feel that she was compelled to lower it to suit their infirmities.  The intense humility of her self-appreciation, and the unfeigned readiness with which she would even herself with any sinner who sought her counsel, had the same effect upon those who would compare what she condemned in herself with what she tolerated in them.  And at the same time, no doubt, this total absence of self-sufficiency had something to do with the passionate tenderness with which commonplace people dared to cherish their immortal friend.”