Very often, of old, it was Nature that enticed Mr. Meredith into these ravishing escapades; in “Lord Ormont” he seems pretty nearly to have broken with Nature. Yet, now and then, he puts before us a bit of the outside world with a compression of phrase, a brilliance of technique, and an imaginative atmosphere, not easily to be matched. “A wind was rising. The trees gave their swish of leaves, the river darkened the patch of wrinkles, the bordering flags amid the reed-blades dipped and streamed. . . . “The trees were bending, the water hissing, the grasses all this way and that, like the hands of a delirious people in surges of wreck. . . . “Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes. Bee-note and woodside blackbird, and meadow cow, and the leap of the fish of the silver rolling rings, composed the music.” But often as Mr. Meredith’s imagination seeks and realizes the beautiful, it still more often works in the grotesque, and decks out his subject with arabesque detail. His satirical comment on the life he portrays finds its way to the reader through the constant innuendoes of figurative language. “She probably regarded the wedding by law as the end a woman has to aim at, and is annihilated by hitting; one flash of success and then extinction, like a boy’s cracker on the pavement. . . . “Thither he walked, a few minutes after noon, prepared for cattishness. . . . He would have to crush her if she humped and spat, and he hoped to be allowed to do it gently. . . . Lady Charlotte put on her hump of the feline defensive; then his batteries opened fire and hers barked back on him.” That Mr. Meredith often overworks these grotesque figures even his warmest admirers must admit. There is a passage in the opening chapter of “Beauchamp’s Career,” where for two pages he describes the creation of an artificial war-panic under the figure of “a deliberate saddling of our ancient nightmare of Invasion.” Before Mr. Meredith consents to have done with this figure, even his most obsequious admirers must be desolated at his persistence. One is tempted to borrow the figure, and to call this kind of writing Mr. Meredith’s nightmare style, when a figure like a nightmare gets the bit in its teeth and goes racing across country with the author madly grimacing on its back.