ication 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
who have enriched the world with great thoughts and fine creations,
might best be content to rest unmarked 'where heaves the turf in many a
mouldering heap,' leaving as little work to the literary executor,
except of the purely crematory sort, as did Aristotle, Plato,
Shakespeare, and some others whose names the world will not willingly
let die. But this is a stoic's doctrine; the objector may easily retort
that if it had been sternly acted on, we should have known very very
little about Dr. Johnson, and nothing about Socrates.

This is but an ungracious prelude to some remarks upon a book, which
must be pronounced a striking success. There will be very little dispute
as to the fact that the editor of these memorials of George Eliot has
done his work with excellent taste, judgment, and sense. He found no
autobiography nor fragment of one, but he has skilfully shaped a kind of
autobiography by