As a work of art, it is, indeed, the most complete and perfect thing that Meredith has done--a flawless masterpiece without any of the writer’s eccentric deviations and mannerisms. Perhaps oppressively witty, though much less so than ‘Diana,’ striking none but the delicately comic chord, and turning to pathos upon the point of a smiling curl of the lip, it carries us through a few weeks’ comedy at a pleasant canter to the accompaniment of fanciful humour and polished irony. If we come upon an occasional odd effect--a queer simile, a bit of isolated poetry lapsed into prose, a bar of pure melody dropped into speech--we recognise with pleasure and delight the author of ‘Richard Feverel,’ and we greet him with a cordial smile. This other writer is new to us, but not the less welcome--less serious, more polished and more fanciful; and while less of a poet, he is more of an artist--less philosophic, he is much more scientific. The play of wit is less sparkling and more penetrative. It shines, a soft luminous light, with undiminished radiance throughout the book, lending itself less easily to quotation, baffling even the memory by the quality of the flying phrases. Upon all subjects of daily life has he something original to say, and he can even be poetical and fresh, and compel our senses to delighted thrills upon the worn-out theme of woman’s dress--a theme that wrecks other writers and leaves them dismayed by the dulness and insipidity of their own description. Read those lines in ‘The Egoist,’ upon Clara’s dress in a breeze. The characters, as I have said, are few. Clara, the heroine, described by Vernon Whitford, that scholar and student of equable temper, as ‘a mountain echo’--an idea that still lingers with us when we have closed the book as the sum of her sweetness, wholesomeness and natural charm--and by Mrs. Mountstuart less felicitously as ‘a dainty rogue in porcelain.’ Here we gather an added something of her exterior, and _look_ at a mountain echo with the eyes of fashion, just as we see through the same sharp and unimaginative eyes ‘the sunken brilliancy of the lean long-walker and scholar in a Phœbus-Apollo turned fasting friar,’ and the poetess, Lætitia Dale, upon her vivid stroke, ‘coming with a romantic tale upon her eyelashes.’ This is one of Meredith’s tricks--the uttering of pointed phrases by the tongues of sharp, clever women. Sometimes they are far-fetched; always are they too carefully trimmed and edged, as hasty phrases have not often the felicity of being edged. In general it is the fault of his characters to talk too brilliantly, and he forgets that men and women in their commonplace moods are not habitually metaphorical and literary.