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Rh the influence of Dante. Goethe's preponderance is explicable by Strauss's reason, that Sirius may be larger than the sun, but ripens no grapes for us. It is recorded that George Eliot thought Shakespeare unjust to women ; and we may believe that a mind so carefully poised was repelled by his flagrant insularity, his leaning for obvious characters, his insensibility to the glories of Greece and the mystery of the Renaissance, his indifference to the deeper objects for which his generation contended. The preference for Dante, with all his passion, fanaticism, and poverty of logic, is a symptom of that swerving towards religious sentiments which, in spite of Comte, if not by virtue of Comte, marked the later years.

Beyond the pleasures of literature arose the sterner demand for a certain rule of life in place of the rejected creeds. The sleepless sense that a new code of duty and motive needed to be restored in the midst of the void left by lost sanctions and banished hopes never ceased to stimulate her faculties and to oppress her spirits. After the interrupted development and the breach with the entire past, only her own energy could avail in the pursuit that imparted unity to her remaining life. It was the problem of her age to reconcile the practical ethics of unbelief and of belief, to save virtue and happiness when dogmas and authorities decay. To solve it she swept the realm of knowledge and stored up that large and serious erudition which sustains all her work, and in reality far exceeded what appears on the surface of the novels or in the record of daily reading. For an attentive observer there are many surprises, like that of the mathematician who came to give her lessons and found that she was already in the differential calculus. It is her supreme characteristic in literature that her original genius rested on so broad a foundation of other people's thoughts ; and it would be hard to find in her maturer life any parallel to Mr. Spencer's historic inacquaintance with Comte, or to the stranger ignorance of Mr. Spencer's own existence avowed in 1881 by Michelet, the legendary mantle-bearer of Hegel.