follow and declare our own impressions.  In this respect I know no man so great as he—­that difference of opinion rouses no egotistic irritation in him, and that he is ready to admit that another argument is the stronger the moment his intellect recognises it’ (ii. 279).  This will sound very easy to the dispassionate reader, because it is so obviously just and proper, but if the dispassionate reader ever tries, he may find the virtue not so easy as it looks.  Finally, and above all, we can never forget in Lewes’s case how much true elevation and stability of character was implied in the unceasing reverence, gratitude, and devotion with which for five-and-twenty years he treated her to whom he owed all his happiness, and who most truly, in his own words (ii. 76), had made his life a new birth.

The reader will be mistaken if he should infer from such passages as abound in her letters that George Eliot had any particular weakness for domestic or any other kind of idolatry.  George Sand, in Lucrezia Floriani, where she drew so unkind a picture of Chopin, has described her own life and character as marked by ’a great facility for illusions, a blind benevolence of judgment, a tenderness of heart that was inexhaustible; consequently great precipitancy, many mistakes, much weakness, fits of heroic devotion to unworthy objects, enormous force applied to an end that was wretched in truth and fact, but sublime in her thought.’  George Eliot had none of this facility.  Nor was general benignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with a great deal of particular censure.  Universal benevolence never lulled an active critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at all consisting in hiding from an impostor that you have found him out.  Like Cardinal Newman, for whose beautiful passage at the end of the Apologia she expresses such richly deserved admiration (ii. 387), she unites to the gift of unction and brotherly love a capacity for giving an extremely shrewd nip to a brother whom she does not love.  Her passion for Thomas-a-Kempis did not prevent her, and there was no reason why it should, from dealing very faithfully with a friend, for instance (ii. 271); from describing Mr. Buckle as a conceited, ignorant man; or castigating Brougham and other people in slashing reviews; or otherwise from showing that great expansiveness of the affections went with a remarkably strong, hard, masculine, positive, judging head.

The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive companionship with a man of lively talents were not without some compensating drawbacks.  The keen stimulation and incessant strain, unrelieved by variety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by participation in the external activities of the world, tended to bring about a loaded, over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was not only not wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness and strength of artistic work.  The presence of