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A “littérateur, physiologist and metaphysician,” as an obituary in The New York Times called him in 1878, Lewes is today most remembered as the longtime romantic partner and de facto agent of George Eliot: author of works consistently ranked among the best of Victorian literature — perhaps all of English literature.

When he wasn’t blasting Big 10 Conference defenses, he was studying the works of the German metaphysician Immanuel Kant or tending to a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle without using the box as a guide.

Italo Calvino: I’d need a master metaphysician, storyteller and prestidigitator to make something glittering out of my mostly repetitive and rather beige existence.

They are places, Mr. Steiner said, “for assignation and conspiracy, for intellectual debate and gossip, for the flâneur and the poet or metaphysician at his notebook,” open to all.

He was a radical obsessed with both revolution and order, an incorrigible skeptic and an insightful metaphysician.