From Meredith to Hall Caine is from the study of the analyst to the foundry of the statuary; from art in cold calm to art in stormy fire. Here, too, is a force at work but it is strength at stress, and not at ease. Meredith is not very greatly moved. He sympathises, but he sympathises from the brain. His heart is right towards the world, but it is cool. The man we are now dealing with has a passionate sympathy. He is hot at heart, and he does not look on at the movement of mankind as merely understanding it, and analysing it, and liking it,--and making allowances for it. He is tumultuous and urgent, daring and impetuous, eager to say a great word. His conceptions shake him. They are all grandiose and huge. The great passions are awake in them--avarice, lust, hate, love, god-like pity, supreme courage, base fear. The whole trend of his mind is towards the heroic. He struggles to be in touch with the actual, and he makes many incursions upon it, but Romance snatches him away again, and claims him for her own. His native and ineradicable concept of a work of art in fiction is a story that shall shake the soul. This inborn passion for the vast and splendid in spiritual things is always in strict subordination to a moral purpose. Here is the reason for his hold upon the English-speaking people, which is probably, at this moment, deeper and wider than that of any other living writer. I do not deal in what I am now about to say with the critical adjustment of relative powers, but simply with a question of temperament You may draw a triangle, and at one of its extremes you may place Meredith, at another Stevenson, and at another Hall Caine. At one extremity you have an artist whose methods are almost purely intellectual, at the next you have an embodiment of sympathetic receptivity, and at the third a man whose forces are almost wholly emotional and dynamic. Stevenson’s main literary prompting was to say a thing as well as it could possibly be said. Hall Caine’s chief spur is a fiery impulse to a moral warning.