there were ten, who read him in 1841, nine got no further than the Critique of Pure Reason, and knew him as the dreaded assailant of popular evidences. When George Eliot stood before his statue at Berlin she was seized with a burst of gratitude, but she hardly became familiar with his later works.
Mr. Bray was a phrenologist who remained faithful to the cause after it had been blighted by Dr. Carpenter ; and he soon found out that, if there is truth in phrenology, Miss Evans must be a portent. Mrs. Bray and her sister, the Cara and Sara of the biography, relieved the sadness and the solitude of her life at home, and comforted her in fits of nervous depression, in her fretful introspection, in her despair of ever winning affection or doing work worth living for. She associated with their friends, used their library, and surveyed the world through their windows. Greek and German, and the depths of unconscious energy within, carried her presently beyond their sphere, and she followed her own path in literature. A time came when the correspondence between them fell under constraint. But for ten eventful years, in which her mind was forming and settling upon fixed lines, this family group was able to encourage and to limit her progress, and the letters to Miss Hennell, written under the stress of transition, described her first attempts to steer without the accustomed stars : —
