life a new birth.

The reader will be mistaken if he should infer from such passages as
abound in her letters that George Eliot had any particular weakness for
domestic or any other kind of idolatry. George Sand, in _Lucrezia
Floriani_, where she drew so unkind a picture of Chopin, has described
her own life and character as marked by 'a great facility for illusions,
a blind benevolence of judgment, a tenderness of heart that was
inexhaustible; consequently great precipitancy, many mistakes, much
weakness, fits of heroic devotion to unworthy objects, enormous force
applied to an end that was wretched in truth and fact, but sublime in
her thought.' George Eliot had none of this facility. Nor was general
benignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with a
great deal of particular censure. Universal benevolence never lulled an
active critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at all
consisting in hiding from an impostor that you have found him out. Like
Cardinal Newman, for whose beautiful passage at the end of the
_Apologia_ she expresses such richly deserved admiration (ii. 387), she
unites to the gift of unction and brotherly love a capacity for giving
an extremely shrewd nip to a brother whom she does not love. Her
passion for Thomas-a-Kempis did not prevent her, and there was no reason
why it should, from dealing very faithfully with a friend, for instance
(ii. 271); from describing Mr. Buckle as a conceited, ignorant man; or
castigating Brougham and other people in slashing reviews; or otherwise
from showing that great expansiveness of the affections went with a
remarkably strong, hard, masculine, positive, judging head.

The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive companionship
with a man of lively talents were not without some compensating
drawbacks. The keen stimulation and incessant strain, unrelieved by