some,
who thought that his gaiety bordered on flippancy, that his genial
self-content often came near to shockingly bad taste, and that his
reminiscences of poor Mr. Fitzball and the green-room and all the rest
of the Bohemia in which he had once dwelt, were too racy for his
company, still found it hard to resist the alert intelligence with which
he rose to every good topic, and the extraordinary heartiness and
spontaneity with which the wholesome spring of human laughter was
touched in him.

Lewes had plenty of egotism, not to give it a more unamiable name, but
it never mastered his intellectual sincerity. George Eliot describes him
as one of the few human beings she has known who will, in the heat of an
argument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the wrong, instead
of trying to shift his ground or use any other device of vanity. 'The
intense happiness of our union,' she wrote to a friend, 'is derived in a
high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and
declare our own impressions. In this respect I know _no_ man so great as
he--that difference of opinion rouses no egotistic irritation in him,
and that he is ready to admit that another argument is the stronger the
moment his intellect recognises it' (ii. 279). This will sound very easy
to the dispassionate reader, because it is so obviously just and proper,
but if the dispassionate reader ever tries, he may find the virtue not
so easy as it looks. Finally, and above all, we can never forget in
Lewes's case how much true elevation and stability of character was
implied in the unceasing reverence, gratitude, and devotion with which
for five-and-twenty years he treated her to whom he owed all his
happiness, and who most truly, in his own words (ii. 76), had made his
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 f