1. But see George William Creel, ‘The Poetry of George Eliot’, Diss. University of California, Los Angeles, 1948; Cynthia Ann Secor, ‘The Poems of George Eliot: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Notes’, Diss. Cornell University, 1969; and David H. Siff, ‘The Choir Invisible: The Relation of George Eliot’s Poetry and Fiction’, Diss. New York University, 1968.
2. GE to William Blackwood, 6 March 1874, The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols, ed. G.S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78), VI, 26 (hereafter cited as Letters).
3. Cicero, Letters to Atticus, trans, E. O. Winstedt, in Loeb’s Classicial Library, 3 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), III, 35, letter XII, part 18.
4. Spencer to Frederic Harrison, 26 December 1880, Harrison Collection, Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics; Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 522 (hereafter cited as Haight); Letters, ix, 262 (quoting Edith Simcox’ words).
5. Printing Sadler’s address, the editor of Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 5 (1932), 203–6, called the passage quoting the poem ‘difficult to read’; Haight, in Letters, IX, 324, citing the Daily News, 30 December 1880, notes Sadler’ alteration of ‘immortal dead who live again’ to‘ who still live on’. I find no evidence that the poem was sung, much less at the graveside, as asserted by Marghanita Laski, George Eliot and Her World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 115.