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Rh growing favour which she showed to Catholicism. The Imitation, which is the most perfectly normal expression of Catholic thought, as it bears the least qualifying impress of time and place, and which Comte never wearied of reading and recommending, prepared the sympathy. It had been in her hands when she translated Spinoza and afterwards when she wrote the Mill on the Floss. No thought occurs more often in her writings than that of the persecuted Jews ; but she spares the persecutors. Romola suggests that Catholic life and history is guided by visions ; but the stroke is aimed at other religions as well. The man who, for the pure love of holiness, became a brother of the Order of Torquemada, led up to the central problem of Catholicism, how private virtue and public crime could issue from the same root. Comte has extolled De Maistre, the advocate of the Inquisition ; and when, in her next work, George Eliot approaches the subject, it was done with reserve, and without advancement of learning. Although she preferred the Protestant Establishment to Sectarianism, Catholicism to Protestantism, and Judaism to Christianity, the margin of liking was narrow, and she was content to say that the highest lot is to have definite beliefs.

George Eliot's work was done before Lewes died. A year and a half after his death she married Mr. Cross, and went abroad for the last time. Her husband's illness at Venice was a severe shock to her ; but when she came back to her home, released from the constraint of so many years, a new life began. She was able to indulge her own tastes, choosing retirement, reading the Bible and the Divina Commedia, and hearing the Cardinal at Kensington. There was no return to literary composition. The crowding thought had outgrown her control — "E sulle eterne pagine Cadde la stanca man."

Before the summer was over her health gave way. In one of the last letters, written in an interval of recovered strength, she says that she has been cared for with something better than angelic tenderness. "I do not think I shall have many returns of November, but there