Browning and Meredith repelled him by their style, though they attracted him by their subjects and method of treatment. Some of his letters on literature can be quoted here, as this side of his gifts is little represented in reviews. It will be seen that he talks less of the style and form, than of the temper and insight of the three great romancers, Meredith, Hugo, and Hardy. He is still intent, as they are, on the special kind of subject, "man's inhumanity to women," which we have seen absorbing him. Meredith was not widely read in Oxford in the early eighties by the younger men, though he had always had a small and impassioned public there since 1870. In our time he was rarely quoted. He was too strong for tender youth; and any "scholar" or worshipper of pure form or arbiter of elegancies could preach on Meredith's harshness and quaintness, and wish that he were more considerately feeble. Johnstone's tone when at twenty-five, in 1886, he writes of Meredith is decisive enough, though his words would now be taken as a repetition of the obvious. "Rhoda Fleming," he writes, "left me with increased wonder that its author has not a more generally recognised position. He is the only living English prose-writer with a real mind-kingdom of his own. The story moves like fate--as inevitably, as cruelly (the white sacrifice!), but just misses being dramatic. Why does he not write a play? He could; perhaps something better than has been done for centuries." A year earlier he had written:--"When you say Hugo is 'so false' you must mean not quite practical. Mrs. Gaskell's 'Ruth' is 'false' if you like, as well as irrelevant. Its real tendency is the reverse of the authoress' ostensible purpose. The woman becomes a partner in a union perfectly unpolluted and humane, but unauthorised, and even this is made inevitable. The Quaker element then turns it into tragedy, and the climax is effected by a person who is a sufficiently remarkable instance of a figure created by an apostle of mild propriety. He would have upset the whole scheme of the Redemption by making the good Jesus sin the sin of hate. This worthy, but rather Pharisaical Methodist--this large-boned man of substance who makes responses louder than anyone else--this nameless monster, whose foul-mouthed brawling on discovery of the woman's history while under him as a governess, is made the insult in answer to which her protector produces the _plea_ (which is the purpose of the book); who, perhaps, takes his place as the best type in fiction of the most hateful character that the varying conditions of climate and creed ever yet conspired to produce on this, God's flowery earth--comes duly in for his share in the comprehensive wash-brush at the finish. By the simple expedient of turning his hair from black to white he is qualified for service at the heroine's peaceful tomb, where he joins in dropping the charitable tear.