rge Combe at Edinburgh, and on her way back was the guest of Harriet Martineau, at her delightfully situated house in Ambleside. Her acquaintance with Mr. Herbert Spencer h

Mr. Herbert Spencer said, in a letter to the Daily News, "Our friendship did not commence until 1851 ... when she was alr

estions quite directly-I never had any personal acquaintance with" (naming a prominent Positivist); "never saw him to my knowledge, except in the House of Commons; and th

ve that every main bias of my mind had been taken before I knew him. Like the rest of his

sidence in the Strand, destined to affect the whole future tenor of her life-the acquain

Lion Square, Holborn. This club, from which the one in 'Daniel Deronda' is supposed to have borrowed many of its features, was the point of junction for a most heterogeneous company. Here, amicably seated round the fire, a speculative tailor would hob and nob with some medical student deep in anatomy; a second-hand bookseller having devoured the literature on his shelves, ventilated their contents for the general benefit; and a discursive American mystic was listened to in turn with a Jewish journeyman watchmaker deeply imbued with Spinozism. It is impossible not to connect this Jew, named Cohen, and described as "a man of astonishing subtilty a

cution which embitters any departure from accepted creeds," felt in defiant sympathy with all outcasts. On a dreary November evening, the coveted volumes were at length discovered on the dingy shelves of a second-hand bookseller. By the flaring gaslight, young Lewes, with a beating heart, read on the back of a small brown quarto those thrilling words,

and works in the Westminster Review of 1843, almost the first account of the great Hebrew philosopher which appeared in this country. This article, afterwards incorporated in the 'Biographical History of Philosophy,' formed the nucleus, I believe

ssisting in the editorship of the Classical Museum, he wrote for the Morning Chronicle, the Athen?um, the Edinburgh, Foreign Quarterly, British Quarterly, Blackwood, Fraser, and the Westminster Review. After publishing 'A Biographical History of Philosophy,' through Mr. Knight's 'Weekly Volumes' in 1846, he wrote two novels, 'Ranthorpe,' and 'Rose, Blanche, and Violet,' which successively appeared in 1847 and 1848. But fiction was not his forte, these two productions being singularly crude and immature as compared with his excellent philosophical work. Some jokes in the papers about "r

ical Institution in Edinburgh, he shocked its staid habitués not a little by immediately afterwards appearing on the stage in the character of Shylock: so many, and seemingly incompatible, were Lewes's pursuits. But this extreme mobility of mind, this intellectual tripping from subject to subject, retarded the growth of his popularity. The present mechanical subdivision of labour has most unfortunately also affected the judgment passed on literary and artistic products. Let a man once have written a novel typical of the m

ch a variety of subjects. This life, begun in 1845, the result partly of his sojourn in Germany, did not appear in print until 1855. Ultimately destined to a great and lasting success,

e not only considered the 'Cours de Philosophie Positive' the greatest work of this century, but believed it would "form one of the mighty landmarks in the history of opinion. No one before M. Comte," he says, "ever dreamed of treating social problems otherwise than upon theological or metaphysical methods. He first showed how possible, nay, how imperative, it was that social questions should be treated on the same footing with all other scien

human nature by foreign travel; he had addressed audiences from the lecturer's platform; he had enjoyed the perilous sweets of editing a newspaper; he had even, it is said, played the harlequin in a company of strolling actors. Indeed, Mr. Thackeray

of beard and eyebrow not unsuggestive of a Skye terrier. For the rest, he had a prominent mouth and grey, deeply-set eyes under an ample, finely-proportioned forehead. Volatile by nature, somewhat wild and lawless in his talk, he in turn delighted and shocked his friends by the gaiety, recklessness, and genial abandon of his manners and conversation. His companionship was s

married early in life, found his conjugal relations irretrievably spoiled. How far the blame of this might attach to one side or to the other does not concern us here. Enough that in the intercourse

the appearance of 'Jane Eyre,' when every one was talking of this book and praising the exemplary conduct of Jane in her famous interview with Rochester, Marian Evans, then only four-and-twenty, remarked to a friend that in his position she considered him justified in contracting a fresh marriage. And in an article on Madame de Sablé, written as early as 1854, there is this significant passage in reference to the "laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the marriage-tie in France." "Heaven forbid," she writes, "that we should enter on a defence of French morals, most of all in relation to marriage! But it is undeniable that unions

e has as yet transpired concerning this important step to indicate more than the bare outline of events. Enough that Mr. Lewes appears to have written a letter in which, after a full explanation of his circumstances, he used all his powers of persuasion to w

they had come to realise how perfectly her own conscience had been consulted and satisfied in the matter. Miss Hennell, who had already entered on the scheme of religious doctrine which ever since she has been setting forth in her printed w

g-doing, enjoying the rare happiness of completest intellectual fellowship in the man she loved, the step she had taken made a gap between her kindred and herself which could not but gall her clinging, womanly nature. To some of her early

law higher than that of personal gratification. At the same time, it seems, that no progress could well be made in the evolution of society without these departures on the part of individuals from the well-beaten tracks, for even the failures help eventually towards a fuller recognition of what is beneficial and possible of attainment. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, George Sand, the New England Transcendentalists, with their communistic experiment at Brooke Farm, all more or less strove to be path-finders to a better and happier state of society. George Eliot, however, hardly belonged to this order of mind. Circ

, while so entirely at one, each respected the other's individuality, his own, at the same time, gaining in strength by the contact. Mr. Lewes's mercurial disposition now assumed a stability greatly enhancing his brilliant talents, and for the first time facilitating that concentration of intellect so necessary for the production of really lasting philosophic work. On the other hand, George Eliot's still dormant faculties were roused and stimulated to the utmost by the man to whom this union with her formed the most memorable year of h

a mother. One of the sons had gone out to Natal as a young man, and contracted a fatal disease, which, complicated with some accident, resulted in an untimely death. H