In 1873 Miss Nightingale, like the rest of the world, was reading _Middlemarch_, and a paper which she wrote in that year contained some notice of George Eliot's heroine.[51] "A novel of genius has appeared. Its writer once put before the world (in a work of fiction too), certainly the most living, probably the most historically truthful, presentment of the great Idealist, Savonarola of Florence. This author now can find no better outlet for the heroine--also an Idealist--_because_ she cannot be a 'St. Teresa' or an 'Antigone,' than to marry an elderly sort of literary impostor, and, quick after him, his relation, a baby sort of itinerant Cluricaune (see _Irish Fairies_) or inferior Faun (see Hawthorne's matchless _Transformation_). Yet close at hand, in actual life, was a woman--an Idealist too--and if we mistake not, a connection of the author's, who has managed to make her ideal very real indeed. By taking charge of blocks of buildings in poorest London, while making herself the rent-collector, she found work for those who could not find work for themselves; she organized a system of visitors; ... she brought sympathy and education to bear from individual to individual, ... so that one might be tempted to say, 'Were there one such woman with power to direct the flow of volunteer help, nearly everywhere running to waste, in every street of London's East End, almost might the East End be persuaded to become Christian.' Could not the heroine, the 'sweet sad enthusiast,' have been set to some such work as this? Indeed it is past telling the mischief that is done in thus putting down youthful ideals. There are not too many to begin with. There are few indeed to end with--even without such a gratuitous impulse as this to end them." In this passage, as in much that Florence Nightingale wrote, there is an autobiographical note. She did not marry because she held fast to an ideal--an ideal nearer to that of Octavia Hill than to that of Dorothea Brooke. [51] _Fraser's Magazine_, May 1873. II