he should excite hostility, being himself of no tender fabric, is comprehensible and easily explained by the impatience and sense of irritation that he often rouses in the breasts of his admirers. But we can recognise the qualities and greatness of the writer who provokes our hostility, and generously give him that which is his due, while not withholding that which he excites. Writing of ‘Modern Love,’ Mr. Swinburne, who is certainly upon his own ground in criticising a brother poet, says, ‘Every section of this great progressive poem is connected with the other by links of the finest and most studied workmanship,’ and that ‘a more perfect piece of writing no man alive has ever turned out’ than the noble sonnet beginning, ‘We saw the swallows gathering in the skies.’ Bear in mind this was written by the third living English poet in the year 1862, of a comparatively unknown poet, while yet Browning and Tennyson were writing their best. And then explain how it is that Meredith the poet is still less known than Meredith the novelist, and that until very lately reading people, if asked about George Meredith, invariably corrected the rash questioner by the suggestion that he doubtless meant _Owen_ Meredith. With Owen Meredith they were familiar enough, but George Meredith? They would shake their heads and tell you that they never heard of him, or if, perchance, they had, invariably added the rumour that they had also heard: ‘A perfectly unreadable writer, I believe, whom nobody--possibly not even himself--understands, and very few try to understand.’ Five or six years ago I imagined this incredible ignorance to be exclusive to Dublin, where we are not very assiduous in the pursuit of literature, or of anything else but the fortunes of the political heroes of the hour. But upon crossing the Channel, and finding myself in the blessed atmosphere of literary fervour and progress, I was amazed to see how few were the literary persons I met who knew much more of Mr. Meredith than his name, and even here I was more than once confronted with the inevitable Owen Meredith. That the lovers of Mr. Rider Haggard and John Strange Winter should not read his works is but the completion of their intellectual taste; and strange, indeed, would it be to see a copy of ‘Diana of the Crossways’ in the hands of these worthy persons; but that the readers of Shakespeare and Thackeray and George Eliot should shun him--this is where the incredible and inexplicable eccentricity of public taste displays itself. And yet in 1862 he had written: