While connected with _The Leader_, Lewes had turned his attention to
Goethe, and made a thorough study of his life and opinions. After spending
many months in Weimar, and as a result of his studies in Germany, he
published in 1855 his _Life and Works of Goethe_. It was carefully
re-written in 1873, and the substance of it was given in an abbreviated
and more popular form a few years later. This has usually been accepted
as the best book about Goethe written in English. Mr. Anthony Trollope
expresses the usual opinion when he says, "As a critical biography of
one of the great heroes of literature it is almost perfect. It is short,
easily understood by common readers, singularly graphic, exhaustive, and
altogether devoted to the subject." On the other hand, Bayard Taylor
said that "Lewes's entertaining apology hardly deserves the name of a
biography." It is an opinionated book, controversial, egotistic, and
unnecessarily critical. It was written less with the purpose of
interpreting Goethe to the English reader than of giving expression
to Lewes's own views on many subjects. His chapters on Goethe's science
and on his realism are marked by an extreme dogmatism. The poetic and
religious side of Goethe's nature he was incapable of understanding, and
always misrepresents, as he did that side of his nature which allied Goethe
with Schiller and the other idealists. Lewes was always polemical, had some
theory to champion, some battle to fight. He did not write for the sake of
the subject, but because the subject afforded an arena of battle for the
theories to the advocacy of which he gave his life.

With the completion of his _Life of Goethe_, Lewes turned his attention
more than ever to physiological studies, though he had continued to give
them much attention in the midst of his other pursuits. In 1858 appeared
his _Seaside Studies_, in which he recorded the results of his original
investigations at Ilfracombe, Tenby, Scilly Isles and Jersey. This volume