On the personal point whether an author should ever hear of himself, George Eliot oddly enough contradicts herself in a casual remark upon Bulwer. “I have a great respect,” she says, “for the energetic industry which has made the most of his powers. He has been writing diligently for more than thirty years, constantly improving his position, and profiting by the lessons of public opinion and of other writers” (ii. 322). But if it is true that the less an author hears about himself the better, how are these salutary “lessons of public opinion” to penetrate to him? “Rubens,” she says, writing from Munich, in 1858 (ii. 28), “gives me more pleasure than any other painter whether right or wrong. More than any one else he makes me feel that painting is a great art, and that he was a great artist. His are such real breathing men and women, moved by passions, not mincing, and grimacing, and posing in mere imitation of passion.” But Rubens did not concentrate his intellect on his own ponderings, nor shut out the wholesome chastenings of praise and blame, lest they should discourage his inspiration. Beethoven, another of the chief objects of George Eliot’s veneration, bore all the rough stress of an active and troublesome calling, though of the musician, if of any, we may say, that his is the art of self-absorption. Hence, delightful and inspiring as it is to read this story of diligent and discriminating cultivation, of accurate truth and real erudition and beauty, not vaguely but methodically interpreted, one has some of the sensations of the moral and intellectual hothouse. Mental hygiene is apt to lead to mental valetudinarianism. “The ignorant journalist” may be left to the torment which George Eliot wished that she could inflict on one of those literary slovens whose manuscripts bring even the most philosophic editor to the point of exasperation: “I should like to stick red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his handwriting.” By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic reader finds repellent in George Eliot’s later work might perhaps never have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigor a censorship of the press and the post office which kept every disagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To slop every draft with sandbags, screens, and curtains, and to limit one’s exercise to a drive in a well-warmed brougham with the windows drawn up, may save a few annoying colds in the head, but the end of the process will be the manufacture of an invalid.