First Visit to England. 127 



gry at the imposition.* The book was quickly whipped out 

 of sight. 



He thinks Mrs. Lewes the greatest woman living, if not 

 the greatest female intellect that has ever appeared in the 

 world. Lewes and wife live much by themselves, receive a 

 few friends on Sunday, and he is the only person who has 

 admission to them at all times. He called there one day 

 as she was finishing The Mill on the Floss, and Mr. Lewes, 

 who was just leaving the house for an errand, met him on 

 the steps. "Oh, Spencer," he exclaimed, " do go in and 

 comfort Polly ; she is crying her eyes out over the death of 

 her children " (i. e. Tom and Maggie Tulliver). To obtain 

 emotional relaxation after writing Adam Bede she read 

 through his Psychology the second time. She is masculine 

 in features, but soft and feminine m manners. He says he 

 first proposed her writing fiction and pressed her into it. 

 She was full of self-distrust, but at last she told him she 

 had commenced Scenes in Clerical Life. He and Huxley 

 think Silas Marner one of her very best things — a perfect 

 prose poem.f 



He says Huxley has a new work on the relation of the 



* Youmans's recollection was not quite accurate, for later in the letter 

 he adds that Mrs. Youmans copied the writing in the album above referred 

 to, and the latter part runs thus : " A similar course has been pursued at 

 Oban to induce travellers to breakfast at the hotel, which reason may have 

 operated also in this case." It was friends who had been treated that way, 

 not himself. 



f Another anecdote of Lewes and George Eliot may find a place here. 

 Lewes had arranged to take a ramble in the countiy with Spencer and 

 Youmans, but was prevented at the last minute, as the following note ex- 

 plained : " My dear philosopher : Polly is ill, and as husbands are indi- 

 visible (and for that reason probably -no matter), I am sorry to say that I 

 shall not have a leg or a cerebellum at your service. Faithfully yours, 

 G. H. Lewes." The quip on the divisibility of matter is a fair specimen of 

 the atrocious puns and jokes with which Lewes was always bubbling over. 

 There was something tonic and refreshing in that irrepressible flow of ani- 

 mal spirits. 



