is this philosophy stated forcibly and at length. Naturalness in all things is the keynote of his utterance. It is from his poetry that we gain the clue to that humorous and seemingly harsh, satirical attitude towards worldliness which distinguishes his novels and has occasioned the frequent outcry that Mr. Meredith is a heartless epigrammatist. The truer criticism is that he derides the artifices, the sham decencies and mawkish sentimentality of society as the earnest champion of the natural. Thus we find Sir Willoughby Patterne in “The Egoist” demonstrating the pursuit of a spurious worldly philosophy, as we find the hero of “Richard Feverel” proving the mistake of yoking nature to an artificial system, while his women, such as Clara in “The Egoist,” Nataly in “One of Our Conquerors,” and Diana in “Diana of the Crossways,” are clear, protesting voices against masculine prejudices and feminine bondage. This is also the teaching of his remarkable poem entitled “Modern Love.” George Meredith has within the last few months added to his poetical works a work called “Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History” (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), which while having a Pindarian sublimity of intent, a plentitude of rapt and fiery passages is too involved and vague to constitute a real master-work. Whatever be said of Meredith’s faults, a serious reading of his verse cannot but persuade one that he is a poet who is distinctly virile and worth while. Though much that he has written may have the mark of mortality, there is much also that wears the amaranthine wreath of eternal life, either for beauty of phrase or for profundity of philosophic truth. THOMAS HARDY. Genius proves itself as much by the tenacity of its taste for one handicraft as by anything else; it evidences itself not so much in versatility as in volume. It is rather a mark of mediocre mentality when a man must needs lay his hand to the doing of this and that. Genius, as a rule, has no such itch; generally speaking, he is content to fulfill himself in one given direction—to maintain his being in a single sphere with a passion superior to that of his fellows. Thus it is we seldom find after leaving the regions of facile talent writers whose inspiration expresses itself in prose and poetical form with equal seriousness; one is the vehicle of the divine voice, the other a mere diversion. Goethe, it is true, has given us “Wilhelm Meister,” Victor Hugo was a great poet as well as a great romancer, George Meredith, as we have endeavored to show, is a singer of peculiar force as well as a master novelist, and among the later literary figures of especial power we have Kipling, whose prose and poetry about balance the scale of worth; but the exceptions are few, and the logic of letters tends to show oneness of aim in the case of genius.