The British race, we know, has never been remarkable for brilliancy, nor, to any special degree, has it given evidence of perspicacity. But nowhere has it shown such an inexcusable and comical consistency of stupidity as in its slow recognition of Mr. Meredith, and its blundering acceptance of him when once a few laudatory reviews have revealed to it the existence of a prophet in its midst. We have had among us for more than thirty years a giant, and a race of pigmies, noted for nothing but the absence of genius, of even marked individuality in their stream of literary production, that flows on continuously and uneventfully, gape and blink at the odd sound of his voice, and persist in regarding him as a grotesque monster. He brings us the fruits of his colossal intellect in masterpiece after masterpiece, and because he applies some hard knocks to our understanding, never bright and always fearful of the new, we either turn from him in cold neglect, or else we grow witty with the wit of pigmies, at his expense, and accuse him ‘of breaking his shins over his own wit.’ That which we do not understand, we decide, with the superiority of the inane and the ignorant, to be not worthy the understanding. Used as we have been to the lucid prose of Thackeray and the brilliant vulgarity and homeliness of Dickens, spoiled as our literary talent has been more recently by the flood of bloodless fiction poured into the circulating libraries and fast bringing the monthly magazines to a deadlock of incompetency and unimaginative drivel, can we wonder, though we may deplore, that the taste for excellence and vigour has diminished?