One evening I remember that, after such a ramble and when dinner was over, we ascended the slope of his garden to the little chalet on its height, and there he read me till far into the night hours the whole of that wonderful series of sonnets on Modern Love. This is not the place or the time to assert his claims either as a poet or as a writer of fiction. I have cited his name here and now, because both as an author and as a man he seems to me to possess in the highest degree that superb optimism of spirit which also characterised Browning: an optimism born of no shallow or sentimental survey of life, and yet of strength sufficient to survive all shocks of experience in virtue of its deeper hold upon those secrets of beauty that no personal disaster could efface or destroy. Once when we were discussing the dramas of Ibsen he made, not in criticism but in comment, a remark that has always seemed to me memorable. “There is no picture,” he said, “however overcast its subject, in which the painter, rightly endowed, cannot suggest that beyond the enclosing clouds there is room for a space of blue sky.” He left the comment there without special application to this work or that of the author under discussion, but it dwells in my memory as highly and nobly characteristic of George Meredith the author and of George Meredith the man. The later advent of Mr. Swinburne caused many of us in those days to reconsider the claims of Tennyson and Browning. It is difficult now to realise the sense almost of intoxication with which the new music of his verse was entertained. For a while it seemed to efface the simpler triumphs of Tennyson no less than Browning’s more impetuous but less ordered strains. Its overpowering wealth of rhythmic cadence struck a new note that it was impossible for the younger generation to resist. But it was not Mr. Swinburne who first awakened in me a spirit of reaction against the elder masters of our generation. Before I read _Atalanta in Calydon_ my imagination had been deeply stirred by that first volume of Mr. William Morris’s verse, entitled _The Defence of Guinevere_. I had found there, though in a form perhaps deliberately archaic, that deeper note of passion which Tennyson’s poetry, even at its best, confessedly lacks; and its appeal [Illustration: WILLIAM MORRIS From the painting by G. F. WATTS, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. _Hollyer_ _To face page 209._ ] was the more urgent because Morris too was attracted by the charm of mediæval romance--romance which in Tennyson’s hands had lost something of its primitive dramatic quality, and became, as he developed the Arthurian story, more and more material for setting forth a systematised body of ethical teaching.