He acknowledges the influence of woman in no false, Frenchified way, but accepts it as the strong ordeal and revelation of man. ‘Women have us back to the conditions of primitive man, or they shoot us higher than the topmost star.... By their state is our civilization judged; and if it is hugely animal still, that is because primitive men abound and will have their pasture.’ Of his men, it is the old and oldish young that he draws best. His social epigrammatists and his grave, elderly gentlemen, or his caustic, elderly humorists, like Sir Austin Feverel, the immortal wise youth whose wit never goes to sleep, the gigantic fraud, Richmond Roy, and his _fidus Achates_; Tracy Runningbrook, Stukely Culbrett, Seymour Austen, and a host of such others. We must not forget Clara Middleton’s Irish colonel, a very pleasant figure in ‘The Egoist,’ the German princess’s father and Everard Romfrey. All these men have a point in common. Their wits are keenly alert, and they know not how to be dull. They are also gentlemen. Not that all, or many of Mr. Meredith’s male characters of high social standing, can lay claim to this qualification. There is in him, as in Thackeray, a singularly strong flavour of democracy, and a tendency to reveal us the snob concealed by the varnish of breeding. The young gentlemen in ‘Evan Harrington’ are the exact reverse of our ideal of the article. Harry Jocelyn borrows money from the tradesman he insults before repaying it; gets money from him to give to a wretched girl betrayed by him, and does not apply it to the purpose for which it has been given; conducts himself in all circumstances as an offensive boor and an abject cur. The young lords and squires around him do likewise. Some of the gentlemen and peers in ‘Richard Feverel’ are very unpleasant and shady company, and in ‘Rhoda Fleming,’ Mr. Algernon Blancove would find the average clerk in the back streets of a manufacturing town his superior in manners and morals. We get some queer specimens of upper-class snobocracy in ‘Harry Richmond,’ and what, pray, is Sir Willoughby Patterne if he is not a wondrously decorative and polished snob, contemplating complacently his own superiority in the mirror of his mind’s eye?