Herbert Spencer, who was long associated with George Eliot, and for a time contemplated the possibility of a union with that remarkable woman, pays her a high tribute in _The Study of Sociology_. After explaining the origin in women of the ability to distinguish quickly the passing feelings of those around, he says: "Ordinarily, this feminine faculty, showing itself in an aptitude for guessing the state of mind through the external signs, ends simply in intuitions formed without assignable reasons; but when, as happens in rare cases, there is joined with it skill in psychological analysis, there results in extremely remarkable ability to interpret the mental states of others. Of this ability we have a living example (George Eliot) never hitherto paralleled among women, and in but few, if any, cases exceeded among men." Perhaps the reader who does not know George Eliot would do well to begin with _The Mill on the Floss_, her finest work, which is full of humor, lovely pictures of English rural life and an analysis of soul in Maggie Tolliver that has never been surpassed. Yet the end is cruel and unnatural, as hard and as unsatisfying as the author's own religious creed. Next read _Adam Bede_, one of the saddest books in all literature, with comic relief in Mrs. Poyser, one of the most humorous characters in English fiction. George Eliot drew Dinah Morris from her favorite aunt, who was a Methodist exhorter, and the power and spontaneity of this novel came from the sharpness and clearness of her early impressions, joined to her love of living over again her girlhood days, before doubt had clouded her sky. Also read _Silas Marner_ with its perfect picture of Raveloe, "an English village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices." These descriptions are instinct with poetry, and they affect one like Wordsworth's best poems or like Tennyson's vignettes of rural life. The pale weaver of Raveloe will always remain as one of the great characters in English fiction. Of George Eliot's more elaborate work it is impossible to speak in entire praise. If you have the leisure, and these books I have named please you, then by all means read _Romola_, which is a remarkable study of the degeneracy of a young Greek and of the noble strivings of a great-hearted woman. The pictures of Florence in the time of Savonarola are splendid, but they smell of the lamp. _Middlemarch_ is also worth careful study for its fine analysis of character and motive. In all George Eliot's books her characters develop before our eyes, and this is especially true in this elaborate study of the pathos and the tragedy of human life. George Eliot wrote little poetry, but one piece may be commended to careful attention, "The Choir Invisible." It sums up with impassioned force her ethical creed, which she put in these fine lines: