Mr. Lewes and she were one day good-humoredly recounting the mistaken effusiveness of a too-sympathizing friend, who insisted on assuming that Mr. Casaubon was a portrait of Mr. Lewes, and on condoling with the sad experience which had taught the gifted authoress of ‘Middlemarch’ to depict that gloomy man. And there was indeed something ludicrous in the contrast between the dreary pedant of the novel and the gay self-content of the living _savant_ who stood acting his vivid anecdotes before our eyes. “But from whom, then,” said a friend, turning to Mrs. Lewes, “did you draw Casaubon?” With a humorous solemnity, which was quite in earnest, nevertheless, she pointed to her own heart. She went on to say--and this we could well believe--that there was one character, that of Rosamond Vincy, which she had found it hard to sustain; such complacency of egoism being alien to her own habits of mind. But she laid no claim to any such natural magnanimity as could avert Casaubon’s temptations of jealous vanity, of bitter resentment. No trace of these faults was ever manifest in her conversation. But much of her moral weight was derived from the impression which her friends received that she had not been by any means without her full share of faulty tendencies to begin with, but that she had upbuilt with strenuous pains a resolute virtue--what Plato calls _an iron sense of truth and right_--to which others also, however faulty, by effort might attain. F. W. H. MYERS: ‘George Eliot.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Anecdote of her parting with Tennyson.] She never tired of the lovely scenery about Witley, and the great expanse of view obtainable from the tops of the many hills. It was on one of her drives in that neighborhood that a characteristic conversation took place between her and one of the greatest English poets, whom she met as he was taking a walk. Even that short interval enabled them to get into somewhat deep conversation on evolution; and as the poet afterward related it to a companion on the same spot, he said, “Here was where I said good-bye to George Eliot; and as she went down the hill, I said, ‘Well, good-bye, you and your molecules,’ and she said to me, ‘I am quite content with my molecules.’” A trifling anecdote, perhaps, but to those who will read between the lines, not other than characteristic of both speakers. C. KEGAN PAUL: ‘George Eliot.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: George Eliot’s reading aloud.]