Whatever view we may take of the precise connection between what she
read, or abstained from reading, and what she wrote, no studious man or
woman can look without admiration and envy on the breadth, variety,
seriousness, and energy, with which she set herself her tasks and
executed them. She says in one of her letters, 'there is something more
piteous almost than soapless poverty in the application of feminine
incapacity to literature' (ii. 16). Nobody has ever taken the
responsibilities of literature more ardently in earnest. She was
accustomed to read aloud to Mr. Lewes three hours a day, and her
private reading, except when she was engaged in the actual stress of
composition, must have filled as many more. His extraordinary alacrity
and her brooding intensity of mind prevented these hours from being that
leisurely process in slippers and easy-chair which passes with many for
the practice of literary cultivation. Much of her reading was for the
direct purposes of her own work. The young lady who begins to write
historic novels out of her own head will find something much to her
advantage if she will refer to the list of books read by George Eliot
during the latter half of 1861, when she was meditating _Romola_ (ii.
325). Apart from immediate needs and uses, no student of our time has
known better the solace, the delight, the guidance that abide in great
writings. Nobody who did not share the scholar's enthusiasm could have
described the blind scholar in his library in the adorable fifth chapter
of _Romola_; and we feel that she must have copied out with keen gusto
of her own those words of Petrarch which she puts into old Bardo's
mouth--'_Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et viva
quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur._'

As for books that are not books, as Milton bade us do with 'neat repasts
of wine,' she wisely spared to interpose them oft. Her standards of
knowledge were those of the erudite and the savant, and even in the