ery much he liked being with you, omitting the other side of the
question--namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably
joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was
conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and
the consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully
ever since. Even my husband's affectionate hopefulness cannot
withstand my melancholy demonstration. So pray consider the
kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something
of yourselves only on simple black-letter days, when the Herald
Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning.

This is very pleasant, but such pieces are rare, and the infirmity of
human nature has sometimes made us sigh over these pages at the
recollection of the cordial cheeriness of Scott's letters, the high
spirits of Macaulay, the graceful levity of Voltaire, the rattling
dare-devilry of Byron. Epistolary stilts among men of letters went out
of fashion with Pope, who, as was said, thought that unless every period
finished with a conceit, the letter was not worth the postage. Poor
spirits cannot be the explanation of the stiffness in George Eliot's
case, for no letters in the English language are so full of playfulness
and charm as those of Cowper, and he was habitually sunk in gulfs deeper
and blacker than George Eliot's own. It was sometimes observed of her,
that in her conversation, _elle s'ecoutait quand elle parlait_--she
seemed to be listening to her own voice while she spoke. It must be
allowed that we are not always free from an impression of
self-listening, even in the most caressing of the letters before us.

This is not much better, however, than trifling. I daresay that if a
lively Frenchman could have watched the inspired Pythia on the sublime
tripod, he would have cried, _Elle s'ecoute quand elle parle_. When
everything of that kind has been said, we have the profound
satisfaction, which is not quite a matter of course in the history of
literature, of finding after all that the woman and the writer were one.
The life does not belie the books, nor private conduct stultify public
profession. We close the third volume of the biography, as we have so
often closed the third volume of her novels, feeling to the very core
that in spite of a style that the French call _alambique_, in spite of
tiresome double and treble distillations of phraseology, in s