Other writers have drawn us pictures enough of selfish men and selfish women. They abound in the literature of all races, selfishness being one of our commonest defects. But Meredith has given a heart and soul and mind to the vice; in fine raiment and graceful proportions, smiled upon by the undiscerning, he makes it tread the boards of our common experience, with the blood and nerves and muscles of manhood. This is an achievement of which even a man of such singular genius as his may be proud. Other writers are happy when they succeed in drawing a type--in immortalizing a single character; but this one has done something greater, more unique and more imperishable still. Into space he enables us to stare, marvelling, at something hitherto barely suspected, now a tangible form with familiar lineaments and unforgettable tones of voice, a something that we dimly understand rises up with us and lies down with us, gives the stamp of meanness to our best endeavours, and misleads us in our noblest aspirations. Sir Willoughby is the personality of self that floats subtly round us and centres all our thoughts. It takes a masculine shape because the course of the world, both civilized and barbaric, is directed by the wheels of male selfishness. Feminine selfishness has quite another direction. It affects the domestic circle, the persons and interests immediately within its scope. It may bring added discomfort to the immediate victims, but it leaves the world without merrily indifferent, conscious of superior strength that can always laugh it down, with a vitality that cannot be sapped and a confidence in laws that form a barrier against its encroachments. Not so male egoism. This makes straight for the whole race of women, mercilessly potent by reason of physical force, and backed by all the laws, written and unwritten, of its own making. It is this crushing exposure of the wide-spread plague, the extension and mingling of its fibres, the crudity and coarseness of its very refinement and super-fastidiousness, that gives ‘The Egoist’ a scientific as well as an artistic value, and commands for it in English literature a place apart.