where the features were those of Dante or Savanarola, did not soften as Mill’s had done.  The voice, which was singularly musical and impressive, touched me—­I am more susceptible to voices than to features or complexion—­but no subject that I started seemed to fall in with her ideas, and she started none in which I could follow her lead pleasantly.  It was a short interview, and it was a failure.  I felt I had been looked on as an inquisitive Australian desiring an interview upon any pretext; and indeed, next day I had a letter from Mr. Williams, in which he told me that, but for the idea that I had some business arrangement to speak of, she would not have seen me at all.  So I wrote to Mr. Williams that, as I had been received by mistake, I should never mention the interview; but that impertinent curiosity was not at all my motive in going that unlucky day to The Priory.

Years passed by.  I read everything, poetry and prose, that came from George Eliot’s pen, and was so strong an admirer of her that Mr. W. L. Whitham, who took charge of the Unitarian Church while our pastor (Mr. Woods) had a long furlough in England, asked me to lecture on her works to his Mutual Improvement Society, and I undertook the task with joy.  Mr. H. G. Turner asked for the Ms. to publish in the second number of The Melbourne Review, a very promising quarterly for politics and literature.  I thought that, if I sent the review to George Eliot with a note it might clear me from the suspicion of being a mere vulgar lionhunter.  Her answer was as follows:—­“The Priory, North Bank, Regent’s Park, September 4, 1876.  Dear Madam—­Owing to an absence of some months, it was only the other day that I read your kind letter of April 17; and, although I have long been obliged to give up answering the majority of letters addressed to me, I felt much pleased that you had given me an opportunity of answering one from you; for I have always remembered your visit with a regretful feeling that I had probably caused you some pain by a rather unwise effort to give you a reception which the state of my health at the moment made altogether blundering and infelicitous.  The mistake was all on my side, and you were not in the least to blame.  I also remember that your studies have been of a serious kind, such as were likely to render a judgment on fiction and poetry, or, as the Germans, with better classification, say, in ‘DICHTUNG’ in general, quite other than the superficial haphazard remarks of which reviews are generally made.  You will all the better understand that I have made it a rule not to read writing about myself.  I am exceptionally sensitive and liable to discouragement; and to read much remark about my doings would have as depressing an effect on me as staring in a mirror—­perhaps, I may say, of defective glass.  But my husband looks at all the numerous articles that are forwarded to me, and kindly keeps them out of my way—­only on rare occasions reading to me a passage which he thinks