The next day after our arrival Mrs. Trubner took Mrs. Leland, during a walk, to call on George Eliot, and that evening G. H. Lewes, Hepworth Dixon, and some others came to a reception at the Trubners'. Both of these men were, as ever, very brilliant and amusing in conversation. I met them very often after this, both at their homes and about London. I also became acquainted with George Eliot or Mrs. Lewes, who left on me the marked impression, which she did on all, of being a woman of genius, though I cannot recall anything remarkable which I ever heard from her. I note this because there were most extraordinary reports of her utterances among her admirers. A young American lady once seriously asked me if it were true that at the Sunday afternoon receptions in South Bank one could always see rows of twenty or thirty of the greatest men in England, such as Carlyle, Froude, and Herbert Spencer, all sitting with their note-books silently taking down from her lips the ideas which they subsequently used in their writings! There seemed, indeed, to be afloat in America among certain folk an idea that something enormous, marvellous, and inspired went on at these receptions, and that George Eliot posed as a Pythia or Sibyl, as the great leading mind of England, and lectured while we listened. There is no good portrait, I believe, of her. She had long features and would have been called plain but for her solemn, earnest eyes, which had an expression quite in keeping with her voice, which was one not easily forgotten. I never detected in her any trace of genial humour, though I doubt not that it was latent in her; and I thought her a person who had drawn her ideas far more from books and an acquaintance with certain types of humanity whom she had set herself deliberately to study--albeit with rare perception--than from an easy intuitive familiarity with all sorts and conditions of men. But she worked out _thoroughly_ what she knew by the intuition of genius, though in this she was very far inferior to Scott. Thus she wrote the "Spanish Gypsy," having only seen such gypsies two or three times. One day she told me that in order to write "Daniel Deronda," she had read through two hundred books. I longed to tell her that she had better have learned Yiddish and talked with two hundred Jews, and been taught, as I was by my friend Solomon the Sadducee, the art of distinguishing Fraulein Lowenthal of the Ashkenazim from Senorita Aguado of the Sephardim _by the corners of their eyes_!