f the highest point to which that
culture had reached, and an examination of the sonnets into which
she has put her highest thoughts and aspirations together with a
comparison of those with the mental calibre of Romola will, I think,
support the view I have taken.

Tito, on the other hand, gives us with truly wonderful accuracy and
vigour "the very form and pressure of the time." The pages which
describe him read like a quintessential distillation of the Florentine
story of the time and of the human results which it had availed to
produce. The character of Savonarola, of course, remains, and must
remain, a problem, despite all that has been done for the elucidation
of it since _Romola_ was written. But her reading of it is most
characteristically that which her own idiosyncrasy--so akin to it
in its humanitarian aspects, so superior to it in its methods of
considering man and his relations to the unseen--would lead one to
expect.

In 1869-70, George Eliot and Mr. Lewes visited Italy for the fourth
time. I had since the date of their former visit quitted my house in
Florence, and established myself in a villa and small _podere_ at
Ricorboli, a commune outside the Florentine Porta San Niccolo. And
there I had the great pleasure of receiving them under my roof,
assisted in doing so by my present wife. Their visit was all too short
a one--less than a week, I think.

But one knows a person with whom one has passed even that short time
under the same roof far better than can ever be the result of a very
much longer acquaintanceship during which one meets only in the
ordinary intercourse of society. And the really intimate knowledge of
her which I was thus enabled to obtain has left with me the abiding
conviction that she was intellectually by far the most extraordinarily
gifted person it has ever been my good fortune to meet. I do not
insist much on the uniform and constant tender consideration for
others, which was her habitual frame of mind, for I have known others
of whom the same might have been said. It is true that it is easy for
those in the enjoyment of that vigorous health, which renders mere
living a pleasure, to be kindly; and that George Eliot was never
betrayed by suffering, however protracted and severe, into the
smallest manifestation of impatience or unkindly feeling. But neither
is this trained excellence of charity matchless among women. What
was truly, in my experience, matchless, was simply the power o