Taking a general survey of his qualities, we may note that Meredith the writer and man is always more interesting than even his best characters. It is how he develops them, what he thinks of them, his inimitable asides and epigrams, that we look for most. In this he is not Shakespearian, for whereas we get nothing of Shakespeare in any of his plays, in all of his books do we get much of Mr. Meredith. And in none of them too much. The one in which he sinks himself completely is, to my thinking, except as a remarkable _tour de force_, the least interesting. This is the ‘Shaving of Shagpat.’ George Eliot described it as pleasant light reading. This reads like a joke, if so illustrious and serious a personage as George Eliot could be deemed guilty of perpetrating a joke so mild. The story and its abounding verses are more Eastern than probably anything in Oriental literature, and if we had not ‘Vathek’ as a precedent, we should be disposed to regard the feat as an incredible one. For after ‘The Shaving of Shagpat,’ ‘The Arabian Nights’ reads as a model of sober commonplace and the epitome of everyday experience. Not only is the style Oriental, but facts and colouring and atmosphere are fabulously so. The impression left upon the bewildered reader is that of a kind of dazed passage beaten through a mass of broken jewels in a soft artificial light, richly perfumed with the heavy odours of Eastern flowers and scents. Houris and genii; roses, lilies, nightingales; diamonds, opals, rubies, and sapphires; jets of flame starting into illuminated fountains from the heart of lilies set in opal lakes; winged voyages through the pure Eastern air, over cities and plains and sunlit and moonlit landscape; impassioned Oriental songs, gorgeous metaphor richly massed through a wearisome brilliance of colours and imagery; wild amorous speech and tales, and descriptions of feminine beauty to turn the head of a sage and awaken a throb of envy in the breast of Théophile Gautier. Conceive, in fact, every strong imaginative effect heaped in reckless profusion, till, from sheer fatigue of overwrought senses, we hail with delight and relief the seizure of the Identical, the final triumph of the barber, and the shaving of Shagpat. There are many beautiful passages in it, and the humour of the parody is both subtle and exquisite, but it is too luscious for a single reading, though we may agree with the poet: ‘Ripe with oft telling, and old is the tale, But ’tis of the sort that can never grow stale.’