with pathetic gravity that she knew what she was losing. She did not know it. Ostensibly she was resigning a small group of friends and an obscure position in literature. What she really sacrificed was liberty of speech, the foremost rank among the women of her time, and a tomb in Westminster Abbey.
Mr. Cross is loyal to the memory of Lewes, and affords no support to the conjecture that she longed to be extricated from a position which had become intolerable, or ever awoke to the discovery that she had sacrificed herself to an illusion. With a history open to unfriendly telling there were topics difficult to touch upon and views to which she could not well do justice. She endeavoured, when she became an author, to avert celebrity, to conceal her identity, even to disguise her purpose, and to assume an attitude which was not her own. So essential did secrecy seem to success that the revelation compelled by the report that George Eliot was some one else was felt as a serious injury. There was some cause for diffidence, for toleration, and for a veil of irony. But so far was the difficulty of her position from depressing the moral standard that it served in one respect to raise it. Feuerbach thought it affectation to turn away from immodest scenes, and asserted that enjoyment is a duty. Strauss sneered at the text which laid down the law of Christian chastity. The Westminster Review praised a wife who had procured a mistress for her husband. Rousseau thought Sophie all the better for her sin. With these writers George Eliot had been associated. Her admiration for Rousseau, for Shelley, for Jacques, the most ignominious of George Sand's stories, her description of the indissolubility of marriage as a diabolical law, indicate that her opinions did not always keep the elevated level of her early religion and her later philosophy. But in her novels the tone is extremely high. It is true that the pure mind of Romola had been fed on The Decamerone ; but it is also true that Boccaccio, and not Dante, was the favourite classic of the Florentines of the Renaissance. Gwendolen, having been degraded by marriage without
