Much mention has been made of ‘Richard Feverel,’ the novel of Mr. Meredith’s youth, and, we are told, his own special favourite. The plot of this powerful story turns from a mixture of graceful mirth, delicious wit, and profound reflection, to tragedy, upon what I humbly conceive to be an impossible situation. And this is the sudden separation of Richard from his young bride. But after noting the crudities and errors of taste and judgment, which are frequent enough in the book, and which never once hide from us the lambent flame of genius that steadily burns through the whole, our fear is lest our desire to praise adequately should drop us into hyperbole. It is so much easier to blame than to praise with taste--above all, to praise judiciously. Our wits will always devise fresh methods for a successful use of the whip of censure, but in admiration it is less easy to get beyond the exclamatory period, and the end of simple epithets is soon reached. The stamp of a breathless originality lies upon each character, however minor, and commingled in their creation is an indescribable mixture of weight and delicacy, of solid, massive strength and finish to a hair’s breadth--the finish of a purely-cut cameo. Of the wise youth, that delightful cynic, turning to obesity, and devoted to his stomach, it would be impossible to say enough. Every sentence, long and short, that he utters is a gem of matchless and irresistible wit. Adrian Harley’s wit is unique, and beside him Sheridan himself must be content with a lower place. If he breeds a sceptical thought in our breast, it is the doubt that any man in real life could be so continuously and unpremeditatedly witty throughout a reasonably long record of utterances. Though not purposely a leading character, he becomes so by force of his own individuality, and the pronounced part he plays in the development of Richard’s career. The story opens with a description of the inmates of Raynham Abbey, the seat of Sir Austin Feverel, the hero’s father. This quaint individual is introduced to us as the anonymous author of a notable book, ‘The Pilgrim’s Scrip,’ with one aphorism of which we are startled on the first page: ‘I expect that woman will be the last thing civilized by man.’ We see at once that we have to deal with a gentleman who, like Plato and Schopenhauer, and a long list of intervening philosophers, holds the amiable sex in scorn. Here we have ‘the imperfect animal’ of the one and ‘the ugly sex’ of the other more courteously, but not less contemptuously, defined. There is no pretension to novelty, for he admits that ‘our new thoughts have thrilled dead bosoms.’