to any reader; but there was a great deal of freshness and thought in the book, some of the incidents and one or two of the characters had a flavor of originality about them; and the style was, for the most part, animated and attractive. It was the work of a man of brains, and culture, and taste; and one felt this all through, and was not ashamed of the time spent in reading it. The other of Lewes's novels was called "Rose, Blanche, and Violet." It charmed me a good deal when I read it; but I have not read it lately, and so I forbear giving any decided opinion as to its merits. It is, of course, quite settled now that George Lewes had not in him the materials to make a successful novelist; but men of far less talent have produced far worse novels than his, and been, in their way, successful. Lewes first became prominent in literature as a contributor to the "Leader," a very remarkable weekly organ of advanced opinions on all questions, which was started in London seventeen or eighteen years ago, and died, after much flickering and lingering, in 1861 or thereabouts. The "Leader," in its early and best days, fairly sparkled all over with talent, originality and audacity. It was to extreme philosophical radicalism, (with a dash of something like atheism) what the "Saturday Review" now is to cultured swelldom and Belgravian Sadduceeism. Miss Martineau wrote for it. Lewes and Thornton Hunt (they were then intimates, unfortunately for Lewes) were among its principal contributors; Edward Whitty flung over its pages the brilliant eccentric light which was destined to immature and melancholy extinction. Lewes's theatrical criticisms, which he used to sign "Vivian," were inimitable in their vivacity, their wit, and their keenness, even when their soundness of judgment was most open to question. Poor Charles Kean was an especial object of Lewes's detestation, and was accordingly pelted and peppered with torturingly clever and piquant pasquinades in the form of criticism. Lewes has got wonderfully sober and grave in style since those wild days, and his occasional contributions in the shape of dramatic criticism to the "Pall Mall Gazette" are doubtless more generally accurate, are certainly much more thoughtful, but are far less amusing than the admirable fooling of days gone by. It was in the "Leader," I think, that Lewes carried on his famous controversy with Charles Dickens on the possibility of such spontaneous combustion as that of the old brute in "Bleak House," and it was in the "Leader" that he made an equally famous exposure of a sham spiritualist medium, about whom London was then much agitated. The "Leader," probably, never paid; it was far too iconoclastic and eccentric to be a commercial success, but it made quite a mark and will always be a memory. It did not succeed in its object; but, like the arrow of the hero in Virgil, it left a long line of sparkles and light behind it. Lewes has abandoned Bohemia long