She said:  “I am grateful and yet rather sad to have finished; sad that I shall live with my people on the banks of the Floss no longer.  But it is time that I should go, and absorb some new life and gather fresh ideas.”  They went at once to Italy, where they spent several months in Florence, Venice, and Rome.

In the former city she made her studies for her great novel, Romola.  She read Sismondi’s History of the Italian Republics, Tenneman’s History of Philosophy, T.A.  Trollope’s Beata, Hallam on the Study of Roman Law in the Middle Ages, Gibbon on the Revival of Greek Learning, Burlamachi’s Life of Savonarola; also Villari’s life of the great preacher, Mrs. Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, Machiavelli’s works, Petrarch’s Letters, Casa Guidi Windows, Buhle’s History of Modern Philosophy, Story’s Roba di Roma, Liddell’s Rome, Gibbon, Mosheim, and one might almost say the whole range of Italian literature in the original.  Of Mommsen’s History of Rome she said, “It is so fine that I count all minds graceless who read it without the deepest stirrings.”

The study necessary to make one familiar with fifteenth century times was almost limitless.  No wonder she told Mr. Cross, years afterward, “I began Romola a young woman, I finished it an old woman”; but that, with Adam Bede and Middlemarch, will be her monument.  “What courage and patience,” she says, “are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!” “In authorship I hold carelessness to be a mortal sin.”  “I took unspeakable pains in preparing to write Romola.”

For this one book, on which she spent a year and a half, Cornhill Magazine paid her the small fortune of thirty-five thousand dollars.  She purchased a pleasant home, “The Priory,” Regent’s Park, where she made her friends welcome, though she never made calls upon any, for lack of time.  She had found, like Victor Hugo, that time is a very precious thing for those who wish to succeed in life.  Browning, Huxley, and Herbert Spencer often came to dine.

Says Mr. Cross, in his admirable life:  “The entertainment was frequently varied by music when any good performer happened to be present.  I think, however, that the majority of visitors delighted chiefly to come for the chance of a few words with George Eliot alone.  When the drawing-room door of the Priory opened, a first glance revealed her always in the same low arm-chair on the left-hand side of the fire.  On entering, a visitor’s eye was at once arrested by the massive head.  The abundant hair, streaked with gray now, was draped with lace, arranged mantilla fashion, coming to a point at the top of the forehead.  If she were engaged in conversation, her body was usually bent forward with eager, anxious desire to get as close as possible to the person with whom she talked.  She had a great dislike to raising her voice, and often became so wholly absorbed in conversation that the announcement of an in-coming visitor failed to attract her attention; but the moment the eyes were lifted up, and recognized a friend, they smiled a rare welcome—­sincere, cordial, grave—­a welcome that was felt to come straight from the heart, not graduated according to any social distinction.”