I have been made rather unhappy by my husband’s impulsive proposal about Christmas.  We are dull old persons, and your two sweet young ones ought to find each Christmas a new bright bead to string on their memory, whereas to spend the time with us would be to string on a dark shrivelled berry.  They ought to have a group of young creatures to be joyful with.  Our own children always spend their Christmas with Gertrude’s family; and we have usually taken our sober merry-making with friends out of town.  Illness among these will break our custom this year; and thus mein Mann, feeling that our Christmas was free, considered how very much he liked being with you, omitting the other side of the question—­namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret.  I was conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and the consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully ever since.  Even my husband’s affectionate hopefulness cannot withstand my melancholy demonstration.  So pray consider the kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something of yourselves only on simple black-letter days, when the Herald Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning.

This is very pleasant, but such pieces are rare, and the infirmity of human nature has sometimes made us sigh over these pages at the recollection of the cordial cheeriness of Scott’s letters, the high spirits of Macaulay, the graceful levity of Voltaire, the rattling dare-devilry of Byron.  Epistolary stilts among men of letters went out of fashion with Pope, who, as was said, thought that unless every period finished with a conceit, the letter was not worth the postage.  Poor spirits cannot be the explanation of the stiffness in George Eliot’s case, for no letters in the English language are so full of playfulness and charm as those of Cowper, and he was habitually sunk in gulfs deeper and blacker than George Eliot’s own.  It was sometimes observed of her, that in her conversation, elle s’ecoutait quand elle parlait—­she seemed to be listening to her own voice while she spoke.  It must be allowed that we are not always free from an impression of self-listening, even in the most caressing of the letters before us.

This is not much better, however, than trifling.  I daresay that if a lively Frenchman could have watched the inspired Pythia on the sublime tripod, he would have cried, Elle s’ecoute quand elle parle.  When everything of that kind has been said, we have the profound satisfaction, which is not quite a matter of course in the history of literature, of finding after all that the woman and the writer were one.  The life does not belie the books, nor private conduct stultify public profession.  We close the third volume of the biography, as we have so often closed the third volume of her novels, feeling to the very core that in spite of a style that the French call