As the Creator is just as responsible for foreign countries and foreign races as for Great Britain, these criticisms, as Meredith wittily points out, comprise a review of His grotesques. It is in such light and inimitable pen-strokes, to be found on every page, that he shows us the man made bare to the very heart. All his social virtues are ruthlessly traced to the meanest source: his wish for cloistral purity in woman, his regarding the presence of competing admiration as a soil, to its true Oriental origin, the monster egoism of his prayer that even beyond death his bride should be his alone, and of his desire to shape her character to the feminine of his own, without any consideration for her natural and healthy preference to be herself. All young men who think it part of the poetry of love to wish to see the unhappy maiden of their choice reduced to ashes or incense, and transmuted by love until they literally become ‘the man they are to marry,’ cannot do better than study the Egoist, and see for themselves the manner of man they are. The study will fill them with a sense of horror of themselves and of the accepted notion of the infinity of love which Clara, listening gravely, conceived as ‘a narrow dwelling where a voice droned and ceased not.’ In her sharp apprenticeship as the betrothed of this amiable young squire she learned to become an attentive listener. Little else was expected of her. But it was the destiny of this intelligent and impulsive girl to give Sir Willoughby many a rude lesson in the sex she represented, that left Constantia’s elopement and free talk of male cousins and friends in the shade as minor offences against taste and cloistral reserve. After the preliminary descriptive pages, the book is completely given up to Clara’s struggle for freedom and her lover’s desperate efforts to retain her, fearful of ridicule and the ignominy of a second jilting. She rashly compromises herself with a brilliant Irishman, while unconsciously her heart is given to the Phœbus-Apollo turned fasting friar to whom Sir Willoughby, meditating revenge, intends to hand her over upon granting her the freedom she claims, rejoicing privately in the fact that his own choice had irredeemably spotted her for another. There is something pathetic in the poor Egoist’s delusion, and while we heartily despise him, we are against our judgment forced to pity him when in the strife his true character is exposed even to his life-long silent worshipper, Lætitia, and we see the unhappy gentleman upon his knees to that discarded devotee imploring her to marry him, so that the county should not say that he had been despised and rejected by three women, one of them poor and his inferior. His misfortune and abasement are contemptible in their cause, and contemptibly borne, nevertheless the something in us which responds to this terrible monster within him begets the pity of brotherhood. Degraded, shrunken, stripped of the glory of success, we