Browning thus describes the scene: "Mrs. Lewes generally sat in an armchair at the left of the fireplace. Lewes generally stood or moved about in the back drawing-room. . . . In the early days of my acquaintance the company was small, containing more men than women. Herbert Spencer and Professor Beesly were constant visitors. The guests closed around the fire and the conversation was general. At a later period the company increased, and those who wished to converse with the great authoress whom they had come to visit took their seat in turns at the chair by her side. She always gave us of her best. Her conversation was deeply sympathetic, but grave and solemn, illumined by happy phrases and by thrilling tenderness, but not by humor. Although her features were heavy, and not well proportioned, all was forgotten when that majestic head bent slowly down, and the eyes were lit up with a penetrating and lively gaze. She appeared much greater than her books. Her ability seemed to shrink beside her moral grandeur. She was not only the cleverest, but the best woman you had met. You never dared to speak to her of her works; her personality was so much more impressive than its product."

After Romola there was a pause in George Eliot's work. This book seemed to point to a kind of novel differing slightly from the earlier productions, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, to a new type, at last achieved in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Meanwhile, in the transition, she wrote Felix Holt, published in 1866, a book which in manner though not in success should be classed with Silas Marner. At the same time a greater interest in poetic composition was growing upon her and resulted in 1868 in the long

dramatic poem, The Spanish Gypsy. She had for some time considered and worked on this poem and had chosen Spain as the fittest scene, just as Florence had been suited to Romola. It was with the purpose of studying details that she and Mr. Lewes visited Spain early in 1867. These days seem to have been among her happiest; her letters, usually not very interesting reading, take on a brighter, less self-analytic turn. Instead of questions as to her usefulness in this sad world, she is more apt to write such sentences as, "Last night we walked out and saw the towers of the Alhambra, the wide Vega, and the snowy mountains by the brilliant moonlight."

Soon after, however, depression returned. The sad sickness and slow death in 1869 of young Thornton Lewes, whom she nursed, made a strong impression on her sensitive nature. "This death," she wrote, “ seems to me the beginning of our own." Middlemarch, too, by this time well under way, brought the same travail as Romola. "When a subject has begun to grow in me," she said, "I suffer terribly until it has wrought itself out become a complete organism; and then it seems to take wing and go away from me. That thing is not to be done again, that life has been lived." During the pauses in the writing of Middlemarch she composed more poetry, which, including Jubal and other poems, was published in 1874. Middlemarch began coming out in eight bi-monthly parts on December 1, 1871, under the title Miss Brooke, and was finished in September, 1872. It was immensely successful; nearly 20,000 copies sold by the end of 1874.

Though conceived almost as early as Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, which is in the estimation of some

her greatest work, did not appear till 1876. The composition of it caused her the same anxiety, the "fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature, and not a mere addition to the heap of books,❞— but she was comforted on looking back to see "that I really was in worse health and suffered equal depression about Romola; and, so far as I have recorded, the same thing seems to be true of Middlemarch." Her interest in the Jews, an interest especially revealed in this book, had been growing for some time and was enough to stimulate her manner of moralizing which so many deplore. People "hardly know," she wrote to Mrs. Stowe, "that Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. . . . The best that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness in plain English, the stupidity—which is still the average mark of our culture." The English people were being indeed scourged at all hands; for the genial Dickens was dead, and if they turned from George Eliot, they were like to encounter Ruskin, now grown shrill, or Carlyle, violent with his anathemas.

On November 28, 1878, George Lewes died, leaving her almost inconsolable. One of the first things she did, on collecting herself, was to arrange for a Cambridge "studentship" endowed in his name. The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, her last work, was published the following year. Not long after, May 6, 1880, she married her subsequent biographer, Mr. John Cross. "No one," says Mr. Oscar Browning, "can have studied the character of George Eliot, even superficially, without being convinced how necessary it was for her to have some one to depend upon, and how much her na

ture yearned for sympathy and support." But she did not live long to enjoy the world which she now found "so intensely interesting." She died, after a short attack of throat trouble, "something like croup," on December 22, 1880, and was buried beside Mr. Lewes in Highgate Cemetery.

ALFRED TENNYSON

As the nineteenth century recedes, and so comes more and more into view as a whole, so much greater seems the likelihood that Tennyson will always be regarded as its representative poet in English literature. He was born in its first decade, and died in its last. He came of age during the agitation for the great Reform Bill, echoed the hopes of ardent Liberals who were fain to press on with the good cause,

"Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World;'

but lived to share a growing distrust in democracy, to sneer at "the suffrage of the plow," and to say

"Let us hush this cry of Forward!' till ten thousand years have gone."

He was precisely fifty years old when Darwin's book on the Origin of Species appeared, marking a revolution in man's thought; but he had shared the doubts and dissensions which preceded Darwin's summary, and in his In Memoriam grapples hard with the many difficulties which attended the meeting of a new science and an ancient faith. In poetry he could remember Byron as a living voice, and records the grief with which on an April day in 1824, "a day when the whole world seemed to be darkened for me," he went out and carved on a rock the words "Byron is dead." When the world recorded the poet's own death, he had outlived all but