The inference which I have just suggested may seem to be contradicted by facts. While at Florence George Eliot conceived “a great project,” of which she wrote to Blackwood during her homeward journey. She is anxious to keep it secret, and it will require a great deal of “study and labour,” but she is “athirst to begin.” The project, as she shortly afterwards explains, is for a historical novel, the scene to be Florence, and the period that of Savonarola's career. She postponed the work, however, till she had finished Silas Marner, and then made another visit to Florence in the spring of 1861. She spent thirty-four days there in May and June, devoting the morning hours to “looking at streets, books, and pictures, in hunting up old books at shops and stalls, or in reading at the Magliabecchian Library.” She feels “very brave,” and enjoys the thought of work. “It may turn out,” she adds, “that I can't work freely and full enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart, mind, and conscience don't consent; so that I may feel it was something—however small—which wanted to be done in this world, and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work.” Nobody, it may safely be said, could have undertaken a great task in a more conscientious spirit. She was, as usual, tormented by “hopelessness and melancholy.”