‘Harry Richmond’ is truly a delightful novel, and, next to ‘Richard Feverel,’ ought to be the most popular of George Meredith’s books. It is all wild adventure, bubbling, bursting fun and lyrical outbursts. Impossible to catch and analyse its charm. It is a book written to weave a spell about youth and sober age. Its exuberance is unparalleled; not the exuberance of Dickens or Lever, but a quaint and original exuberance of the metaphysician and the poet taken suddenly to football and nonsense verses. He brings a relish quite other than that of the habitual jester, fetches from his chest wilder shouts of laughter, flings his ball, and tosses off his verses with a sincerity and ardour not known to those to whom such things are in the ordinary way of life. Or, at least, we are at liberty to imagine he would, for few of us have had the privilege of observing such a mixture as metaphysician and poet at play. Who can ever forget the inimitable and arch-impostor, Harry’s father, Richmond Roy--his captivating personality, his eccentricities, his feats, and his comet-like passage across the sky of our imagination? His life is a splendid comedy, though occasionally the comic muse drops us into farce as broad as any to be found in the early English dramatists. We are not even allowed to preserve a decorous gravity at the recital and exposure of his woes and misfortunes. Molière himself never devised a broader farce than his _rôle_ in the German prince’s court and his expulsion therefrom. And Shakespeare himself, had he written nineteenth-century prose, could never have given us a lovelier picture of a little German princess and her English boy-lover, with all the proper scenic effects and landscape beauty. And what, pray, are the rough, swearing old grandfather and Julia’s husband if they be not English to the backbone, brutally, faithfully English, like Squire Western and a host of that school? They are imaged to us pure eighteenth-century--barbaric, powerful, big drinkers, and men of mighty physique, with whom there is no temporizing upon the domestic hearth nor elsewhere. This is not comedy, but life. English, too, are the scenes of Harry’s boyhood, his life in the farm and in school, where he makes the acquaintance of Walter Heriot, in love with Julia, the schoolmaster’s daughter, and his life-long boy-friend; and afterwards the little wild gipsy girl, whom Heriot betrays. All these pictures, vivid and humorous, carry us irresistibly.