Nevertheless, in drawing the girl Romola, her subjectivity has overpowered her objectivity. Romola is not--could never have been--the product of the period and of the civilisation from which she is described as having issued. There is far too much of George Eliot in her. It was a period, it is true, in which female culture trod upon the heels of the male culture of the time perhaps more closely than it has ever done since. But let Vittoria Colonna be accepted, as probably she may be, as a fair exponent of the highest point to which that culture had reached, and an examination of the sonnets into which she has put her highest thoughts and aspirations together with a comparison of those with the mental calibre of Romola will, I think, support the view I have taken. Tito, on the other hand, gives us with truly wonderful accuracy and vigour "the very form and pressure of the time." The pages which describe him read like a quintessential distillation of the Florentine story of the time and of the human results which it had availed to produce. The character of Savonarola, of course, remains, and must remain, a problem, despite all that has been done for the elucidation of it since _Romola_ was written. But her reading of it is most characteristically that which her own idiosyncrasy--so akin to it in its humanitarian aspects, so superior to it in its methods of considering man and his relations to the unseen--would lead one to expect. In 1869-70, George Eliot and Mr. Lewes visited Italy for the fourth time. I had since the date of their former visit quitted my house in Florence, and established myself in a villa and small _podere_ at Ricorboli, a commune outside the Florentine Porta San Niccolò. And there I had the great pleasure of receiving them under my roof, assisted in doing so by my present wife. Their visit was all too short a one--less than a week, I think.