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Rh while Tennyson read his own last poem, or Liebreich sang Schumann's "Two Grenadiers," and Lewes himself, with eloquent fingers and catching laugh, described Mazzini's amazement at his first dinner in London, or the lament of the Berlin professor over the sunset of England since Mr. Gladstone had put an Essay-and-Reviewer on the throne of Phillpotts.

The visit to Germany opened out wider horizons. To chat with Varnhagen von Ense, to explore his archives and admire the miniature of Rahel was a function awaiting literary visitors at Berlin, and Lewes, who had reached Weimar in time to see the Teutonic Boswell, Eckermann, had much to say to the man whom the profane Heine called the vicar of Goethe on earth. The chief interpreter of German thought to the travellers was Gruppe, a scholar of many accomplishments, who has since ended extravagantly, but who had vast knowledge of poetry, a keen sense of the exhausted vitality of speculation, and who in the history of cosmology had measured swords with Bockh. George Eliot spent her time in study, seeing little of the intellectual society of the place, and disliking what she saw. She continued to know Germany mainly as it was at the date of initiation in 1855. Even Feuerbach and Strauss remained embalmed in the attitudes of 1841. The aesthetic age, whose veterans still lingered about Dresden and Berlin, was always more present to her mind than the predominant generation between the parliament of Frankfort and the proclamation of Versailles, the Germany of Helmholtz and Mommsen, Jhering and Fischer, Virchow and Riimelin, Roscher and Treitschke. The only master of this stronger and less artistic school who fixed her attention is Riehl, an author worthy of such a commentator, but not faithful to the methods by which his people succeed.

She saw Nathan der Weise, not in vain. "Our hearts swelled and the tears came into our eyes as we listened to the noble words of dear Lessing, whose great spirit lives immortally in this crowning work of his." Twenty years later she explained the design of Deronda by the reasons given in the preface to the Juden. The altered