I only remember seeing Tennyson twice--once in a crowded drawing-room, and once on the slopes of Blackdown, in his big cloak. The strong set face under the wide-awake, the energy of undefeated age that breathed from the figure, remains with me, stamped on my memory, like the gentle face of Mrs. Wordsworth, or a passing glimpse--a gesture--of George Meredith as we met on the threshold of Mr. Cotter Morison's house at Hampstead, one day perhaps in 1886 or 1887, and he turned his handsome curly head with a smile and a word when Mr. Morison introduced us. He was then not yet sixty, already a little lame, but the radiant physical presence scarcely marred. We had some passing talk that day, but--to my infinite regret--that was the only time I ever saw him. Of his work and his genius I began to be aware when "Beauchamp's Career"--a much truncated version--was coming out in the _Fortnightly_ in 1874. I had heard him and his work discussed in the Lincoln circle, where both the Pattisons were quite alive to Meredith's quality; but I was at the time and for long afterward under the spell of the French limpidity and clarity, and the Meredithian manner repelled me. About the same time, when I was no more than three or four and twenty, I remember a visit to Cambridge, when we spent a week-end at the Bull Inn, and were the guests by day of Frederic Myers, and some of his Trinity and King's friends. Those two days of endless talk in beautiful College rooms with men like Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, Mr. Gerald Balfour, Mr. George Prothero, and others, left a deep mark on me. Cambridge seemed to me then a hearth whereon the flame of thought burnt with far greater daring and freedom than at Oxford. Men were not so afraid of one another; the sharp religious divisions of Oxford were absent; ideas were thrown up like balls in air, sure that some light hand would catch and pass them on. And among the subjects which rose and fell in that warm electric atmosphere, was the emergence of a new and commanding genius in George Meredith. The place in literature that some of these brilliant men were already giving to _Richard Feverel_, which had been published some fifteen years earlier, struck me greatly; but if I was honest with myself, my enthusiasm was much more qualified than theirs. It was not till _Diana of the Crossways_ came out, after we had moved to London, that the Meredithian power began to grip me; and to this day the saturation with French books and French ideals that I owed to my uncle's influence during our years at Oxford, stands somewhat between me and a great master. And yet, in this case, as in that of Mr. James, there is no doubt that difficulty--even obscurity!--are part of the spell. The man behind is _great enough_, and rewards the reader's effort to understand him with a sense of heightened power, just as a muscle is strengthened by exercise. In other words, the effort is worth while; we