Nevertheless, in drawing the girl Romola, her subjectivity has overpowered her objectivity.  Romola is not—­could never have been—­the product of the period and of the civilisation from which she is described as having issued.  There is far too much of George Eliot in her.  It was a period, it is true, in which female culture trod upon the heels of the male culture of the time perhaps more closely than it has ever done since.  But let Vittoria Colonna be accepted, as probably she may be, as a fair exponent of the highest point to which that culture had reached, and an examination of the sonnets into which she has put her highest thoughts and aspirations together with a comparison of those with the mental calibre of Romola will, I think, support the view I have taken.

Tito, on the other hand, gives us with truly wonderful accuracy and vigour “the very form and pressure of the time.”  The pages which describe him read like a quintessential distillation of the Florentine story of the time and of the human results which it had availed to produce.  The character of Savonarola, of course, remains, and must remain, a problem, despite all that has been done for the elucidation of it since Romola was written.  But her reading of it is most characteristically that which her own idiosyncrasy—­so akin to it in its humanitarian aspects, so superior to it in its methods of considering man and his relations to the unseen—­would lead one to expect.

In 1869-70, George Eliot and Mr. Lewes visited Italy for the fourth time.  I had since the date of their former visit quitted my house in Florence, and established myself in a villa and small podere at Ricorboli, a commune outside the Florentine Porta San Niccolo.  And there I had the great pleasure of receiving them under my roof, assisted in doing so by my present wife.  Their visit was all too short a one—­less than a week, I think.

But one knows a person with whom one has passed even that short time under the same roof far better than can ever be the result of a very much longer acquaintanceship during which one meets only in the ordinary intercourse of society.  And the really intimate knowledge of her which I was thus enabled to obtain has left with me the abiding conviction that she was intellectually by far the most extraordinarily gifted person it has ever been my good fortune to meet.  I do not insist much on the uniform and constant tender consideration for others, which was her habitual frame of mind, for I have known others of whom the same might have been said.  It is true that it is easy for those in the enjoyment of that vigorous health, which renders mere living a pleasure, to be kindly; and that George Eliot was never betrayed by suffering, however protracted and severe, into the smallest manifestation of impatience or unkindly feeling.  But neither is this trained excellence of charity matchless among women.  What was truly, in my experience, matchless, was simply