From this time forward, reviews, articles, criticisms--hostile, humorous, and eulogistic--begin to abound; and by the time of ‘Diana’s’ appearance, the British public has been made ready to receive the intelligence that a master is in their midst--a living, breathing master, such as Tennyson and Browning, and from whom work may happily still be expected. What effect this announcement may have had upon the British public cannot be perfectly defined. Being unenthusiastic, except in the matter of low and familiar literature, it is to be feared that such news has but moderately moved it, and in the matter of taste, has not influenced it at all. This new master is unfamiliar to them in his speech and in his ideas. He does not dwell upon sordid scenes with visible pleasure; he claims them with a voice that is not of their common tongue, and faces them without the old-fashioned twinkle of the grave jester’s glance. If he caricatures humanity, it is not as Dickens caricatures it, to tickle us into inextinguishable laughter, nor yet as Thackeray does, in a vein of comic satire. If he calls upon us to recognise that life is often a sad blunder, and to pity the blunderers, he is neither sentimental in his claim, nor consciously pathetic. He indulges neither in the mawkish sentiment of Dickens, nor in the sentimental tenderness of Thackeray, and as little courts our tears as our laughter. Brain is what he asks of us, and its use in reading him. CHAPTER II. MEREDITH’S STYLE AND INFLUENCE.