e lived
simply, that she might spend much of this for poor relations.

In 1854 she resigned her position on the _Westminster_, and went with
Mr. Lewes to Germany, forming a union which thousands who love her
must regard as the great mistake of a very great life.

Mr. Lewes was collecting materials for his _Life of Goethe_. This took
them to Goethe's home at Weimar. "By the side of the bed," she says,
"stands a stuffed chair where he used to sit and read while he drank
his coffee in the morning. It was not until very late in his life that
he adopted the luxury of an armchair. From the other side of the
study one enters the library, which is fitted up in a very make-shift
fashion, with rough deal shelves, and bits of paper, with Philosophy,
History, etc., written on them, to mark the classification of the
books. Among such memorials one breathes deeply, and the tears rush to
one's eyes."

George Eliot met Liszt, and "for the first time in her life beheld
real inspiration,--for the first time heard the true tones of the
piano." Rauch, the great sculptor, called upon them, and "won our
hearts by his beautiful person and the benignant and intelligent charm
of his conversation."

Both writers were hard at work. George Eliot was writing an article
on _Weimar_ for _Fraser_, on _Cumming_ for _Westminster_, and
translating Spinoza's _Ethics_. No name was signed to these
productions, as it would not do to have it known that a woman wrote
them. The education of most women was so meagre that the articles
would have been considered of little value. Happily Girton and Newnham
colleges are changing this estimate of the sex. Women do not like
to be regarded as inferior; then they must educate themselves as
thoroughly as the best men are educated.

Mr. Lewes was not well. "This is a terrible trial to us poor
scribblers," she writes, "to whom health is money, as well as all
other things worth having." They had but one sitting-room between
them, and the scratching of another pen so affected her nerves, as to
drive her nearly wild. Pecuniarily, life was a harder struggle than
ever, for there were four more mouths to be fed,--Mr. Lewes' three
sons and their mother.

"Our life is intensely occupied, and the days are far too short,"
she writes. They were reading in every spare moment, twelve plays of
Shakespeare, Goethe's works, _Wilhelm Meister, Goetz von Berlichingen,
Hermann and Dorothea, Iphigenia, Wanderjahre, Italianische Reise_,