But, like Dickens, Meredith is a poet, and, like him, has all a poet’s extravagances and excesses. Scott, as a poet, is never excessive, never exuberant, and always exact. His strength is employed with a Scotch perception of its just value, whereas his Saxon brothers waste theirs with an endless profusion. Not that I would compare Meredith with Dickens, except in his tendency to caricature, which in Dickens is a vice, and in his poetical excesses. He tortures metaphor at times, and lacks measure. This is the complaint French artists bring against their English brethren. Perhaps their greater physical strength, added to the Teutonic strain that flows through their blood from the early ages, runs to excess in imagination, and produces a conception of the grotesque unapprehended by the French. Certain it is that the latter escape our violent emotions in literature, and cannot arrive at an understanding of them. Our sensibilities, strung to common themes, and unexcited by lawless love and cerebral complications, rouse their wonder; and the mixture of buffoonery and satire in our great writers incurs their indignation. For this they say we are not artists, and ignore the classical limitations of art. And doubtless they are right. Upon the whole, our works of art are less artistic than theirs, and are produced in a lesser quantity, while our greatest works sin frequently against every known canon of art. In shedding a double ray of ridicule upon his comic characters, Mr. Meredith so envelops and twists them in metaphor, now mildly sarcastic, now a joyous shout of laughter, we cannot tell with or at us, for we are not in the secret of his comic moods; and at times so bitingly ironical that we are puzzled and astray. Fain would we know whether he feels tenderly towards us at our worst, or cherishes an inalterable contempt for us at our best. For, unlike Thackeray, he is no moralist. Here, at least, is an English novelist whom M. Taine cannot accuse of laying down hard and fast rules for our moral benefit. His two most cynical characters attract some of our sympathy. Whereas we are ordered to loathe and condemn Becky Sharpe, and feel how much her railing creator despised her, Meredith allows us to be glad of his Countess’s acquaintance, and shows us that a cynical, intriguing woman, full of vulgar pride and not illegitimate ambition, may be interesting, and not unloved by her creator. He invites us to wonder at her, and not condemn, and though he may laugh at her weaknesses, and take a wicked pleasure in exposing them, he cannot be said, on the whole, to show her any harshness. As an adventuress, she is unsurpassed, and, unlike poor Becky, lives and dies, we imagine, a fine lady, driven by ambition to duplicities, but not consciously mean or dishonest. Though a virtuous woman, her morals are crooked, and her sense of honour is the reverse of keen. We have seen how such a character in Thackeray’s hands would