This is Mr. Meredith, un-English and impersonal, and he pleases us less. We prefer his human comedy and his home comic muse to this parody of distant literature. We like best to feel his Saxon iron grasp and his deep glance ransacking humanity, as it lives and breathes, to its uttermost depth, and twisting it to every unimaginable revelation. We feel then in the presence of our prose Browning, earnest even in his laughter; Titanic, with an unsuspected softness of heart beneath a rugged and untender manner, and upon a homely shaft of mother-wit ready to shade from us the scientific penetration of his inward vision of us. His wit is like a rainbow lighting up a stormy sky, and his mocking carries no baleful suggestion of a sneer. CHAPTER VI. GEORGE MEREDITH’S MEN AND WOMEN. Like Shakespeare and Scott, Mr. Meredith is uniformly gallant in his romances. With the exception of Richard, his young heroes are generally feeble youths; sometimes pleasant and good-natured, like Harry Richmond and Evan Harrington, and at others bloodless, make-believe men like Wilfred Pole and Percy Dacier. But all, as in the case of Scott’s amiable young men and Shakespeare’s lovers, are merely foils for the greater worth of the heroines. Imogen, Juliet, Beatrice, Miranda, the ladies of the gentlemen of Verona, Portia, and Lady Macbeth are all unworthily mated, and as Mr. Ruskin has said of Scott’s heroes, we are left wondering at the extreme and unmerited good fortune of these various young men who have drawn prizes, apparently as rewards for their amiable and pleasing manners. The fluted tenor of romance is on the whole an ill-treated personage. We invent him to do the love-making instead of ourselves with the different ideals of feminine perfection we imagine. But with his qualifications, his serious merits, we are not concerned. So long as he is handsome, has the art of using his voice, his mouth, and his eyes, carries his doublet and hose gracefully, twangs the guitar of loverhood musically, and recites his sonnets to advantage--behold the virtues we demand of him. He must be picturesque, above all, and the bloom of youth must lie upon his cheek, else as a sonneteer and troubadour is he pronounced unserviceable by the orchestra.