WHEN a history or biography makes its way by fifty years of slow growth from the full-leather binding of the gentleman’s library to the paper-backed edition sold at a shilling, it is beyond the reach of negative criticism. George Henry Lewes wrote a “History of Philosophy,” which gained him the consideration of scholars. His “Studies in Animal Life” showed his sympathy with the high purposes of science. His “Aristotle” and “Life of Goethe” testified his habit of frequenting “the higher walks” of the world’s literature. But only in his “Life of Robespierre” has he attained what seems to be the enduring honor of the paper back. The popularity of the book is due first to its picturesqueness, but scarcely less to the essay writer’s habit of limiting himself. There is a sufficient element of completeness in the treatment of each episode to allow the book to be read, a little at a time, with satisfaction. For those who believe or feel with Dr. Johnson that “smattering” is a necessary habit of the human intellect, a result of the compulsion under which it cannot escape practicing the comparative method of scientific investigation, the essayist must always be the best historian and the most instructive biographer.

  Lewes was born in London, April 18th, 1817. He lived to the age of sixty-one, dying November 30th, 1878, after a life devoted industriously and successfully to literature. It seems to be the irony of some half-mocking moral law, that such a man after such labors should be remembered chiefly as the associate of George Eliot!—the man who gave up his own uncongenial family life to seek the pleasures of intellectual sympathy. It is irony, however, which probes what seems to be the radical failing of his character,—a failing which initially was more than half a virtue,—the fineness of nerve which made all that is repulsive in life so painful to him that he shunned it, and so lost that discipline of intellectual disturbance through which moral greatness is fostered and enabled to find its readiest expression.