“There is no biography.  An article entitled ‘George Henry Lewes’ appeared in the last New London Quarterly.  It was written by a man for whom he had much esteem; but it is not strong.  A few facts about the early life and education are given with tolerable accuracy, but the estimate of the philosophic and scientific activity is inadequate.  Still it is the best thing you could mention to Dr. Haller.  You know perhaps that a volume entitled The Study of Psychology appeared in May last, and that another volume (500 pp.) of Problems of Life and Mind has just been published.  The best history of a writer is contained in his writings; these are his chief actions.  If he happens to have left an autobiography telling (what nobody else can tell) how his mind grew, how it was determined by the joys, sorrows, and other influences of childhood and youth—­that is a precious contribution to knowledge.  But biographies generally are a disease of English literature.

“I have never yet told you how grateful I was to you for writing to me a year ago.  For a long while I could read no letter.  But now I have read yours more than once, and it is carefully preserved.  You had been with us in our happiness so near the time when it left me—­you and your husband are peculiarly bound up with the latest memories.

“You must have had a mournful summer.  But Mr. Trollope’s thorough recovery from his severe attack is a fresh proof of his constitutional strength.  We cannot properly count age by years.  See what Mr. Gladstone does with seventy of them in his frame.  And my lost one had but sixty-one and a half.

“You are to come to England again in 1881, I remember, and then, if I am alive, I hope to see you.  With best love to you both, always, dear Mrs. Trollope,

“Yours faithfully,

“M.E.  LEWES.”

* * * * *

The “words of Dr. Haller,” to which the above letter refers, were to the effect that one of Lewes’s great advantages in scientific and philosophical research was his familiar acquaintance with the works of German and French writers, which enabled him to follow the contemporaneous movement of science throughout Europe, whereas many writers of learning and ability wasted their own and their readers’ time in investigating questions already fully investigated elsewhere, and advancing theories which had been previously proved or disproved without their knowledge.  Dr. Ludwig Haller, of Berlin, in writing to me about G.H.  Lewes, then recently deceased, had said, if I remember rightly, that he had some intention of publishing a sketch of Lewes in some German periodical.  I am not aware whether this intention was ever carried into effect.

The attack to which the above letter alludes was a very bad one of sciatica.  At length the baths of Baden in Switzerland cured me permanently, but after their—­it is said ordinary and normal, but very perverse—­fashion, having first made me incomparably worse.  I suffered excruciatingly, consolingly (!) assured by the doctor that sciatica never kills—­only makes you wish that it would!  While I was at the worst my brother came to Baden to see me, and on leaving me after a couple of days, wrote to my wife the following letter, which I confiscated and keep as a memorial.