He and I used to walk about the country together when "Polly" was indisposed for walking; and I found him an incomparable companion, whether a gay or a grave mood were uppermost. He was the best _raconteur_ I ever knew, full of anecdote, and with a delicious perception of humour. She also, as I have said--very needlessly to those who have read her books--had an exquisite feeling and appreciation of the humorous, abundantly sufficient if unsupported by other examples, to put Thackeray's dicta on the subject of woman's capacity for humour out of court. But George Eliot's sense of humour was different in quality rather than in degree from that which Lewes so abundantly possessed. And it was a curious and interesting study to observe the manifestation of the quality in both of them. It was not that the humour, which he felt and expressed, was less delicate in quality or less informed by deep human insight and the true _nihil-humanum-a-me-alienum-puto_ spirit than hers, but it was less wide and far-reaching in its purview of human feelings and passions and interests; more often individual in its applicability, and less drawn from the depths of human nature as exhibited by types and classes. And often they would cap each other with a mutual relationship similar to that between a rule of syntax and its example, sometimes the one coming first and sometimes the other. I remember that during the happy days of this visit I was writing a novel, afterwards published under the title of _A Siren_, and Lewes asked me to show him the manuscript, then nearly completed. Of course I was only too glad to have the advantage of his criticism. He was much struck by the story, but urged me to invert the order in which it was told. The main incident of the plot is a murder caused by jealousy, and I had begun by narrating the circumstances which led up to it in their natural sequence. He advised me to begin by bringing before the reader the murdered body of the victim, and then unfold the causes which had led to the crime. And I followed his advice. The murder is represented as having been committed on a sleeping person by piercing the heart with a needle, and then artistically covering the almost imperceptible orifice of the wound with wax, in such sort as to render the discovery of the wound and the cause of death almost impossible even by professional eyes. And I may mention that the facts were related to me by a distinguished man of science at Florence, as having really occurred.