cookery-book, strong in the fabrication of preserves and home-made medicines, superintending her children’s studies, and arching mournful and uncomprehending brows at the moral and intellectual vagaries a man like Richard would be certain to develop. An admirable wife and mother, but an inadequate study. It has been remarked that for Mr. Meredith’s readers there is no half-way house between uncompromising hostility and discipleship. You either bend before him as your master--imperfect at times, genius having its limitations as all things else that are human, but great in his very imperfections--or you reject him utterly. How those who reject him can manage to reconcile it to their conscience, I am at a loss to understand. But this proves the texture and quality of his influence. It is immense or it is nought. And by this pronounced feeling he evokes may he be classed as the founder of a school. He has introduced a new element into English literature--a healthy and purely philosophic realism, which differs as widely from the realism of Fielding as it does from that of Zola. To French wit he brings German profundity of thought, the whole wrought into a thoroughly Saxon setting. Vividness of conception, intensity of vision, and strength of diction--combine these qualities, and you have English such as no other writer has given us. It is beautiful, with a beauty all its own, and there seems to be no feat of which it is not capable. He has ransacked our language until he has wrought it, through a process of bewildering originality, into a flexibility, a forcible simplicity, a majesty and rhythm that, in his prose, surpass poetry. Never before have we received such a lesson in the unimagined resources of language. Never before did we so understand how written words may be made to seize us, fell us, captivate us, make vivid and tangible to our mind every image, every trick of person, every hue and aspect of nature. He does not describe or paint: he simply vitalizes inanimate objects. And if he had not made us his debtor in any other way, we must thank him for his great and perfect disciple, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson. CHAPTER III. THE NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH: ‘RICHARD FEVEREL’ AND ‘RHODA FLEMING.’ As this little book is written for those who have the misfortune not to be acquainted with the novels of Mr. Meredith, I do not think it will be inadvisable to add to my essay a slight sketch of each one, hoping thereby to send readers to the head source. Those who allow themselves to be persuaded thereto will have reason to thank me, even should they be among the common majority, unable to appreciate to its full value the new chapter in English literature offered them.