and sorrow itself seems too full for tears. After it the catastrophe of the last chapter is smoothly bridged, and the sadness of Lucy’s death and Richard’s rise from a sick-bed, numbed with grief, is but a softly-appropriate drop-scene. As a story, ‘Rhoda Fleming’ is, perhaps, the simplest and strongest work of Mr. Meredith. Certainly it is the best-told story from the artistic point of view. Like ‘Richard Feverel,’ it ends tragically, only here the tragic effects are not concentrated upon the end. They pervade the entire book, and the termination is led up to consistently almost from the beginning, where we meet the two sisters, with minds and beauty above their sphere, and see them silently watched by two young gentlemen. The foreboding is unanalyzable, but it is a foreboding, and we apprehend storm and contention and sombre lights. Sombre the book is throughout, and we regard it as almost impertinent to yield to the occasional pricks of humour that tickle us into quiet laughter. How can we bear to laugh at the oddities of mankind, even at the bidding of such a master, when we see a sweet and pure girl’s life going to ruin, and understand that the very nature of her is such that there is no return from the wreck, no after-sunshine to restore the ravages of storm? Here is no picturesque mingling of lights and shadows, no lyrical romance, no melodies of the upper spheres, to imperil the dark remembrance of the _dénouement_. The very opening is shadowed. At a village feast, when children danced upon a mirthful May Day on a green, lapped in the soft beauty of Kentish landscape, appeared a young woman, who had left her home with a spotted name, and who was left in silence humbly apart. Dahlia Fleming, pitying her, expresses to her father a wish to speak to her. The father stoutly forbade her, and when Rhoda, the stronger, defied him, and went and stood by the poor girl, he punished her by not speaking to her for a week. And the girls, reflecting on this, marvelled at the cruelty of even the kindest men to offending or repentant women. This is where Mr. Meredith is so original and so just. It is impossible to go far on the road of life without being frequently confronted with the unrecognised fact that it is men, and not women, who are hardest and most cruel to fallen women. It is they in their capacity of householder who pronounce the verdict of damnation, as this Kentish farmer did, and it is soft and innocent women who, like these country maidens, would fain offer them the hand of sympathy and sisterhood. Mr. Meredith never follows the beaten track of generalities. When he gives us a generality, it is one of his own discovery, and you may depend upon finding a very sound truth at the bottom of it.