*****
La Madeleine Jan. 20, 1881
What I said of Ruskin was only to excuse the platitude I wrote in his book, not to rescue my letters from appropriate destruction.
You evidently think that George Eliot is not the only novelist at whose feet I have sat, and that I have learned from "Endymion" the delicate art of flattery. So that the seed of suspicion has taken root after all, and I hang by my own rope.
We might perhaps agree about Trevelyan better than you suppose. I probably started from a lower estimate of the man, and was astonished at his fulness of knowledge and the vigour of his pen. The oblique style of narrative is said to be an invention of Gibbon, and Trevelyan is of course full of Gibbon's times and writings. And I quite agree with you that the business of historians is to get out of the way, and, like the man who plays Punch, to concentrate attention on their personages. Nobody, however, did this less than his illustrious uncle.
I shall look out with extreme interest for your kinsman's[[66]] review of George Eliot. I heard so many hard things said of her by Arnold and Palgrave, but Wolseley is one of her admirers.
*****
La Madeleine Jan. 21, 1881
My letter was hardly posted when yours arrived. Besides what you mention, Arthur Lyttelton would find an important paper in the Pall Mall of the last week of the year, on the early Warwickshire life of George Eliot, and a letter of hers on the original of Dinah. I fancy it would be worth while to look up some of her Westminster reviews between 1850 and 1854; and the last word of her philosophy is more outspoken in Lewes's scientific writings than in her own.