anything short of odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk should
be raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for
the public be printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to
reread his books?' Autobiography, she says, at least saves a man or a
woman that the world is curious about, from the publication of a string
of mistakes called Memoirs. Even to autobiography, however, she
confesses her deep repugnance unless it can be written so as to involve
neither self-glorification nor impeachment of others--a condition, by
the way, with which hardly any, save Mill's, can be said to comply. 'I
like,' she proceeds, 'that _He being dead yet speaketh_ should have
quite another meaning than that' (iii. 226, 297, 307). She shows the
same fastidious apprehension still more clearly in another way. 'I have
destroyed almost all my friends' letters to me,' she says, 'because they
were only intended for my eyes, and could only fall into the hands of
persons who knew little of the writers if I allowed them to remain till
after my death. In proportion as I love every form of piety--which is
venerating love--I hate hard curiosity; and, unhappily, my experience
has impressed me with the sense that hard curiosity is the more common
temper of mind' (ii. 286). There is probably little difference among us
in respect of such experience as that.

[Footnote 1: _George Eliot's Life_. By J.W. Cross. Three volumes.
Blackwood and Sons. 1885.]

Much biography, perhaps we might say most, is hardly above the level of
that 'personal talk,' to which Wordsworth sagely preferred long barren
silence, the flapping of the flame of his cottage fire, and the
under-song of the kettle on the hob. It would not, then, have much
surprised us if George Eliot had insisted that her works should remain
the only commemoration of her life. There be some who think that those