the key of his mind and his moods, but it is refreshing after the dance young Mr. Beauchamp has led us, and promises to lead us, to the end sans intermission. He is not returned for Parliament, happily for the country, and again we are rewarded for our trials and patient endurance of them by another glimpse, all too brief, of Renée in her Norman home at Tourdestelle. This is a delightful break, but the inconsequence of Mr. Meredith’s characters! None of them seem to know their own mind, neither the men nor the women. At one moment we find Beauchamp wanting to run away with Renée, and Renée holding back. At another Renée running off to Beauchamp, and Beauchamp virtuously holding back. Again, Cecilia awaits his proposal, and he is inexplicably silent, though pushed to claim her by inclination, interest and friends; when he makes up his mind to propose, she is off to Italy, engaged to a man she does not love, knowing the man she loves was to arrive the day of her departure to claim her. Do some people act in this way out of such a novel? We are constantly expecting Beauchamp to wreck society and create a revolution. Yet at the end his uncle, the quaint, twelfth-century baron, says: ‘He hasn’t marched to London with a couple of hundred thousand men, and he escapes what Stukely calls his nation’s scourge, in the shape of a statue turned out by an English chisel. No, we haven’t had much public excitement out of him. But one thing he did do: he _got me down on my knees_.’ He married Jenny Denham and left a son behind him. This is all he did besides. CHAPTER V. ‘THE EGOIST,’ ‘DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS,’ ‘TRAGIC COMEDIANS,’ AND ‘SHAVING OF SHAGPAT.’ But however great and individual ‘Richard Feverel’ and the other novels of George Meredith may be, and however high a place some of us may accord them in the collection of books that, once read, become our daily companions--a sort of mental sustenance upon which we speedily learn to fall back from sheer force of habit--not even ‘Richard’ can be described as the most individual of Meredith’s works. In it is no hint given of the peculiar stand this new genius was to take among modern writers. In it we were not led to scent the great champion, the mighty swordsman of woman, by his commonplace Lucy and his silent Clare. ‘Richard Feverel’ was like a sun-burst, broken with storm and strife, flashed upon the insipidity of latter-day fiction and exposing its perishableness. Of such a writer anything and everything might justly be expected, but even from him was ‘The Egoist’ a surprise from which we have not yet had time to recover.