the power of her intelligence; the precision, the promptitude, the rapidity (though her manner was by no means rapid), the largeness of the field of knowledge, the compressed outcome of which she was at any moment ready to bring to bear on the topic in hand; the sureness and lucidity of her induction; the clearness of vision, to which muddle was as impossible and abhorrent as a vacuum is supposed to be to nature; and all this lighted up and gilded by an infinite sense of, and capacity for, humour,—­this was what rendered her to me a marvel, and an object of inexhaustible study and admiration.

To me, though I never passed half an hour in conversation with her without a renewed perception of the vastness of the distance which separated her intelligence from mine, she was a companion each minute of intercourse with whom was a delight.  But I can easily understand that, despite her perfect readiness to place herself for the nonce on the intellectual level of those with whom she chanced to be brought in contact, her society may not have been agreeable to all.  I remember a young lady—­by no means a stupid or unintelligent one—­telling me that being with George Eliot always gave her a pain in “her mental neck,” just as an hour passed in a picture gallery did to her physical neck.  She was fatigued by the constant attitude of looking up.  But had she not been an intelligent girl, she need not have constantly looked up.  It would be a great mistake to suppose that George Eliot’s mental habits exacted such an attitude from those she conversed with.

Another very prominent and notable characteristic of that most remarkable idiosyncrasy was the large and almost universal tolerance with which George Eliot regarded her fellow creatures.  Often and often has her tone of mind reminded me of the French saying, “Tout connaitre ce serait tout pardonner!” I think that of all the human beings I have ever known or met George Eliot would have made the most admirable, the most perfect father confessor.  I can conceive nothing more healing, more salutary to a stricken and darkened soul, than unrestricted confession to such a mind and such an intelligence as hers.  Surely a Church with a whole priesthood of such confessors would produce a model world.

And with all this I am well persuaded that her mind was at that time in a condition of growth.  Her outlook on the world could not have been said at that time to have been a happy one.  And my subsequent acquaintance with her in after years led me to feel sure that this had become much modified.  She once said to me at Florence that she wished she never had been born!  I was deeply pained and shocked; but I am convinced that the utterance was the result, not of irritation and impatience caused by pain, but of the influence exercised on the tone of thought and power of thinking by bodily malady.  I feel sure that she would not have given expression to such a sentiment when I and my wife were subsequently staying with her and Lewes at their lovely home in Surrey.  She had by that time, I cannot but think, reached a brighter outlook and happier frame of mind.