In all fiction there is not another girl so enchanting and healthily intelligent as Clara Middleton--none described like her. In addition to the attractions of birth, breeding, and beauty which the writer thoroughly relishes, are those of sensibilities that can be delicate without affectation, a delightful wit untainted by smartness, singular good taste and tact, and honesty of soul. Here is a sparkling young woman as clear as daylight, as fresh as the morning dew, beautiful to look upon, as Meredith’s women always are, sweet and bewitching without any shabby tricks of mind or habit, who at the same time thinks for herself, a rare virtue in the male novelist’s heroine. She is all warm blood and variable moods, as befits her age and sex, but never once untrue to the finest instincts of maidenhood, and unerring in her judgment. She is not perfect, her accomplishments are not enumerated, we never find her playing Beethoven or reading the stars, and somehow, without one word having been said upon the subject, we get the impression that she is a young woman of intellectual resources, and qualified to pronounce upon subjects that engage the minds of sages and artists, while the music of youth runs blithely through her veins, and her feet are nimble in a race with a school-boy. It is her struggle with her lover, the Egoist, that completes the interest of the book. Here we have Mr. Meredith purified, polished, complete, without any break in the unity of his work, or any awkward twist in the even flow of narrative, based solely upon subtle and most delicate analysis. The durability of such work is quite as obvious as that of the best that has already withstood the test of centuries, and when to-day’s literature comes to be old-fashioned, ‘The Egoist’ will still hold its place as a lasting monument of psychological diagnosis.