George Eliot’s means of access to books were very full. She knew French, German, Italian, and Spanish accurately. Greek and Latin, Mr. Cross tells us, she could read with thorough delight to herself; though after the appalling specimen of Mill’s juvenile Latinity that Mr. Bain has disinterred, the fastidious collegian may be sceptical of the scholarship of prodigies. Hebrew was her favorite study to the end of her days. People commonly supposed that she had been inoculated with an artificial taste for science by her companion. We now learn that she took a decided interest in natural science long before she made Mr. Lewes’s acquaintance, and many of the roundabout pedantries that displeased people in her latest writings, and were set down to his account, appeared in her composition before she had ever exchanged a word with him. All who knew her well enough were aware that she had what Mr. Cross describes as “limitless persistency in application.” This is an old account of genius, but nobody illustrates more effectively the infinite capacity of taking pains. In reading, in looking at pictures, in playing difficult music, in talking, she was equally importunate in the search, and equally insistent on mastery. Her faculty of sustained concentration was part of her immense intellectual power. “Continuous thought did not fatigue her. She could keep her mind on the stretch hour after hour; the body might give way, but the brain remained unwearied” (iii. 422). It is only a trifling illustration of the infection of her indefatigable quality of taking pains, that Lewes should have formed the important habit of re-writing every page of his work, even of short articles for Reviews, before letting it go to the press. The journal shows what sore pain and travail composition was to her. She wrote the last volume of _Adam Bede_ in six weeks; she “could not help writing it fast, because it was written under the stress of emotion.” But what a prodigious contrast between her pace, and Walter Scott’s twelve volumes a year! Like many other people of powerful brains, she united strong and clear general retentiveness, with a weak and untrustworthy verbal memory. “She never could trust herself to write a quotation without verifying it.” “What courage and patience,” she says of some one else, “are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything,” and her own existence was one long and painful sermon on that text.