Lewes wrote at one time a great deal for the "Westminster Review." It was during his connection with it that he became acquainted, at Dr. Chapman's house, with Marion Evans. There was a great similarity between their tastes. Both loved the study of languages, and of philosophical thought, and of literature and science generally. Both were splendid in conversation, brilliant in epigram; both loved music and were intensely susceptible to its influence. The mind of the woman was, I need hardly say, far the stronger, wider, deeper of the two; but the affinity was clear and close. A great misfortune had fallen on Lewes; and he was probably in that condition of mind which makes a man not unlikely to lose his faith in everything and drift into hopeless, perpetual cynicism. From this, if this impended over him, Lewes was saved by his intercourse with the rarely-gifted woman he had met in so timely an hour. The result is, as every one knows, a companionship and union unusual indeed in literary life. Very seldom has a distinguished author had for wife a distinguished authoress, or _vice versa_; indeed, it used to be one of the dear delightful theories of blockheads that such unions, if they could take place, would be miserably unhappy. This theory, so soothing to complacent dulness, was hardly borne out in the instance of the Brownings; it is just as little corroborated by the example of "George Eliot" and George Lewes. I believe, too, the example of George Eliot is highly unsatisfactory to the devotees of that other theory, so long cherished by dolts of both sexes, that a woman of talent and culture can never do anything in the way of mending or making, of cooking a chop or ordering a household. People tell us they can trace the influence of Lewes's varied scholarship and critical judgment in the novels of George Eliot. It is hardly possible to doubt that some such influence must be there, but I certainly never saw it anywhere distinctly and openly evident. It would be poor art which allowed a thin stream of Lewes to be seen sparkling through the broad, deep, luminous lake which mirrors the genius of George Eliot. I am, however, rather inclined to fancy that Lewes, in general, abstains from critical _surveillance_ or restraint over the productions of his greater companion, believing, perhaps, that the higher mind had better be a law to itself. If this be so, I think it is a wholesome principle pushed sometimes too far, for one can hardly believe that the calm judgment of any sincere and qualified adviser would not have discouraged and condemned the painful, unnecessary underplot of past intrigue and sin which is so great a blot in "Felix Holt," or suggested a rapider dramatic movement in some passages of "The Spanish Gypsy." Lewes once wrote to Charlotte Bronté that he would rather be the author of Miss Austen's stories than of the whole of the Waverley Novels. I certainly do not agree with him in that opinion; but it is strange that one who