Although he was alive but yesterday, the novel frequently awarded first position among his works, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," was published a good half century ago. Go back to it, get its meaning, then read the latest fiction he wrote--(he ceased to produce fiction more than a decade before his death) and you appear to be in contact with the same personality in the substantials of story-making and of life-view. The only notable change is to be found in the final group of three stories, "One of Our Conquerors," "Lord Ormont and His Aminta" and "The Amazing Marriage." The note of social protest is louder here, the revolt against conventions more pronounced. Otherwise, the author of "Feverel" is the author of "The Amazing Marriage." Much has occurred in the Novel during the forty years between the two works: realism has traveled to an extreme, neo-idealism come by way of reaction, romanticism bloomed again, the Novel of ingenious construction, the Novel of humanitarian meaning, the Novel of thesis and problem and the Novel that foretells the future like an astrologer, all these types and yet others have been practised; but Meredith has kept tranquilly on the tenor of his large way, uninfluenced, except as he has expressed all these complexities in his own work. He is in literary evolution, a sport. Critics who have tried to show how his predecessors and contemporaries have influenced him, have come out lamely from the attempt. He has been sensitive not to individual writers, but to that imponderable yet potent thing, the time-tendency in literature. He throws back to much in the past, while in the van of modern thought. What, to illustrate, could be more of the present intellectually than his remarkable sonnet-sequence, "Modern Love"? And are not his women, as a type, the noblest example of the New Woman of our day--socially, economically, intellectually emancipated, without losing their distinctive feminine quality? And yet, in "The Shaving of Shagpat," an early work, we go back t the Arabian Nights for a model. The satiric romance, "Harry Richmond," often reminds of the leisured episode method of the eighteenth century; and while reading the unique "Evan Harrington" we think at times of Aristophanes.