than strange it seems to those who find running all through Mr. Meredith’s patriotic portrayal subtle insinuations of a criticism of English life most uninsular in its tenor and most salutary in its drift. As to the precise value of the lesson latent in “Lord Ormont,” there is, of course, much dubious questioning possible. The points at issue, however, are of a kind on which perhaps only the Ulysses of the matrimonial ocean, “much-experienced men” in the storms and sunshine of married life, are in a condition to pronounce. Nevertheless ordinary people may at least admire the conscientious care with which Mr. Meredith has safeguarded his dangerous advice and his somewhat revolutionary plea for the freedom of woman. His preceding novel, “One of our Conquerors,” was from first to last a strenuously faithful study of the penalties that follow infringement of social conventions in the matter of marriage. The book might have been named “Mrs. Burman’s Revenge.” Mrs. Burman concentrated in her unprepossessing person all the mighty forces of prejudice which the society of the western world puts into play to protect one of its sacred institutions, marriage. Poor Nataly, who had ventured after happiness outside of conventional limits, lost happiness and finally life itself solely through her agonizingly persistent consciousness of her false adjustment to her social environment. She had built her house below the level of the dikes, to use Weyburn’s metaphor, and the ever-present danger wore upon her and sapped her life. Having thus set forth with the elaborateness of a three-volume novel, and with the utmost power of his imagination, the almost resistless might of social conventions, their importance, and the danger of defying them, Mr. Meredith in his last book ventures to plead for the individual against society, and to assert the right of the individual occasionally to rebel against a blindly tyrannizing convention. “Laws are necessary instruments of the majority; but when they grind the sane human being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of the savage’s old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice.”