not help writing it fast, because it was written under the stress of emotion.’  But what a prodigious contrast between her pace and Walter Scott’s twelve volumes a year!  Like many other people of powerful brains, she united strong and clear general retentiveness with a weak and untrustworthy verbal memory.  ’She never could trust herself to write a quotation without verifying it.’  ‘What courage and patience,’ she says of some one else, ’are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything,’ and her own existence was one long and painful sermon on that text.

Over few lives have the clouds of mental dejection hung in such heavy unmoving banks.  Nearly every chapter is strewn with melancholy words.  ’I cannot help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure in prospect—­according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to live in past pain.’  The same sentiment is the mournful refrain that runs through all.  Her first resounding triumph, the success of Adam Bede, instead of buoyancy and exultation, only adds a fresh sense of the weight upon her future life.  ’The self-questioning whether my nature will be able to meet the heavy demands upon it, both of personal duty and intellectual production—­presses upon me almost continually in a way that prevents me even from tasting the quiet joy I might have in the work done.  I feel no regret that the fame, as such, brings no pleasure; but it is a grief to me that I do not constantly feel strong in thankfulness that my past life has vindicated its uses.’

Romola seems to have been composed in constant gloom.  ’I remember my wife telling me, at Witley,’ says Mr. Cross, ’how cruelly she had suffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at this time.  The writing of Romola ploughed into her more than any of her other books.  She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a well-defined transition in her life.  In her own words, “I began it a young woman—­I finished it an old woman."’ She calls upon herself to make ’greater efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes from too egoistic a dread of failure.’  ’This is the last entry I mean to make in my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in 1849.  What moments of despair I passed through after that—­despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose!  It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity; and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated’ (ii. 307).  One day the entry is:  ’Horrible scepticism about all things paralysing my mind.  Shall I ever be good for anything again?  Ever do anything again?’ On another, she describes herself to a trusted friend as ’a mind morbidly desponding, and a consciousness tending more and more to consist in memories of error and imperfection rather than in a strengthening sense of achievement.’  We have to turn to such books as Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to find any parallel to such wretchedness.