Mr. Lewes was collecting materials for his Life of Goethe.  This took them to Goethe’s home at Weimar.  “By the side of the bed,” she says, “stands a stuffed chair where he used to sit and read while he drank his coffee in the morning.  It was not until very late in his life that he adopted the luxury of an armchair.  From the other side of the study one enters the library, which is fitted up in a very make-shift fashion, with rough deal shelves, and bits of paper, with Philosophy, History, etc., written on them, to mark the classification of the books.  Among such memorials one breathes deeply, and the tears rush to one’s eyes.”

George Eliot met Liszt, and “for the first time in her life beheld real inspiration,—­for the first time heard the true tones of the piano.”  Rauch, the great sculptor, called upon them, and “won our hearts by his beautiful person and the benignant and intelligent charm of his conversation.”

Both writers were hard at work.  George Eliot was writing an article on Weimar for Fraser, on Cumming for Westminster, and translating Spinoza’s Ethics.  No name was signed to these productions, as it would not do to have it known that a woman wrote them.  The education of most women was so meagre that the articles would have been considered of little value.  Happily Girton and Newnham colleges are changing this estimate of the sex.  Women do not like to be regarded as inferior; then they must educate themselves as thoroughly as the best men are educated.

Mr. Lewes was not well.  “This is a terrible trial to us poor scribblers,” she writes, “to whom health is money, as well as all other things worth having.”  They had but one sitting-room between them, and the scratching of another pen so affected her nerves, as to drive her nearly wild.  Pecuniarily, life was a harder struggle than ever, for there were four more mouths to be fed,—­Mr. Lewes’ three sons and their mother.

“Our life is intensely occupied, and the days are far too short,” she writes.  They were reading in every spare moment, twelve plays of Shakespeare, Goethe’s works, Wilhelm Meister, Goetz von Berlichingen, Hermann and Dorothea, Iphigenia, Wanderjahre, Italianische Reise, and others; Heine’s poems; Lessing’s Laocooen and Nathan the Wise; Macaulay’s History of England; Moore’s Life of Sheridan; Brougham’s Lives of Men of Letters; White’s History of Selborne; Whewell’s History of Inductive Sciences; Boswell; Carpenter’s Comparative Physiology; Jones’ Animal Kingdom; Alison’s History of Europe; Kahnis’ History of German Protestantism; Schrader’s German Mythology; Kingsley’s Greek Heroes; and the Iliad and Odyssey in the original.  She says, “If you want delightful reading, get Lowell’s My Study Windows, and read the essays called My Garden Acquaintances and Winter.”  No wonder they were busy.