In point of fact, the imaginative or figurative quality of his style is probably what costs Mr. Meredith most readers. His perpetually shifting brilliances prove very wearisome to certain eyes. He is too much of a flash-light, or has too much of the flourish of a Roman candle, for those who pride themselves on their devotion to the steady effulgence of the petroleum evening-lamp. Hazlitt used to tell people who objected to Spenser’s “Faery Queen” on the ground of the allegory, that, after all, the poetry was good poetry and the allegory would not bite them. But if you similarly urge upon the objectors to Mr. Meredith’s style, that a story of his is too great to be neglected because of mere questions of phrasing, they are very likely to tell you that they cannot see the story for the glare of the style; just there lies their point. Undoubtedly, at times, Mr. Meredith seems glaringly wilful in his rejection of ordinary rhetorical canons; there is something, too, of a flourish in his eccentricity; and often, apparently out of sheer bravado, he inserts in his stories rollickingly grotesque passages, or throws at the critics long sentences full of the clash of metaphors. One may fancy his exclaiming with Browning,— “Well, British public, ye that like me not, (God love you!) and will have your proper laugh At the dark question, laugh it! I laugh first.” But after all, isn’t he right in maintaining his individuality against all-comers? Can any one who understands the true nature of an individual style and its self-revealing power, wish Mr. Meredith’s style less racy, less figurative, less original? Surely, words and phrases that bear the impress of a nature like Mr. Meredith’s are better worth while than those that have become smooth and shiny with conventional use,—always providing that the metal be twenty-carats fine. The intimacy of the relation that Mr. Meredith’s style makes possible between ordinary folk and a great and original personality is something that cannot be too highly prized in these days of conventionality and democratic averages. The words of most writers now-a-days give us no clew to their individualities. “Tête-à-tête with Lady Duberly?” exclaims the man in the play. “Nay, sir, tête-à-tête with ten-thousand people.” Private ownership in words and phrases seems in danger of becoming, even more speedily than private ownership in land, a thing of the past. The distinction of Mr. Meredith’s style is something to be devoutly grateful for. One would infinitely rather have a notion of the world as it gives an account of itself in Mr. Meredith’s mind, than a conventional scheme of things drawn out in the stereotyped phrases of the rhetorician.