As has already been suggested, her womanliness is a more prominent characteristic of Mrs. Lewes’s mind than its great intellectual power.  Her sympathy was keen and most sensitive, her modesty and humility were almost excessive, and her tenderness of nature was a woman’s own.  She gave her sympathy readily and freely to the humble and unfavored.  She had no taint of intellectual aristocracy, says one of her friends.  Faithful, devoted love; the sacredness of simple duties and plain work; earnest help of other souls,—­these were among the daily lessons of her life and teaching.  “How strong was the current of her sympathy in the direction of all humble effort,” exclaims one of her friends, “how reluctantly she checked presumption!  The most ordinary and uninteresting of her friends must feel that had they known nothing of her but her rapid insight into and quick response to their inmost feelings she would still have been a memorable personality to them.  This sympathy was extended to the sorrows most unlike anything she could ever by any possibility have known—­the failures of life obtained as large a share of her compassion as its sorrows.  The wish to console and cheer was indeed rooted in the most vital part of her nature.”  Another of her friends has said that “she possessed to a marvellous degree the divine gifts of charity, and of attracting moral outcasts to herself, whose devils she cast out, if I may be permitted the expression, by shutting her eyes to their existence.  In her presence you felt wrapped round by an all-embracing atmosphere of sympathy and readiness to make the least of all your short comings, and the most of any good which might be in you.  But great as was her personality, she shrank with horror from intruding it upon you, and, in general society, her exquisitely melodious voice was, unhappily for the outside circles, too seldom raised beyond the pitch of something not much above a whisper.  Of the rich vein of humor which runs through George Eliot’s works there was comparatively little trace in her conversation, which seldom descended from the grave to the gay.  But although she rarely indulged in conversational levity herself, she was most tolerant of it, and even encouraged its ebullition, in others, joining heartily in any mirth which might be going on.”

She made her younger admirers feel the deeper influence of her great personality by inspiring them with the largest moral purposes.  To awaken and to arouse the moral nature seems always to have been her purpose, and to lead it to the highest attainable results.  Earnest young minds never “failed to feel in her presence that they were for the time, at all events, raised into a higher moral level, and none ever left her without feeling inspired with a stronger sense of duty, and positively under the obligation of striving to live up to a higher standard of life.”  Hence her personal influence was considerable, though she led the close life of a student, and did not go