Of Meredith as a poet this is not the place to speak. Suffice it to say that he did his first writing in verse, issuing a volume when twenty-three, and several others later in life, the best known being his sequence of irregular sonnets entitled _Modern Love_ (1867). His poetry, like his prose, is rich in content but difficult at times by reason of its crabbed and meticulous expression--a trait due to no obscurity of thought or lack of feeling, but rather to the desire to compress much meaning within a cryptic phrase. As a playwright, Meredith attempted comedy in The _Sentimentalists_, which was acted posthumously. As an essayist, he fathered a memorable discussion of the comic spirit and its uses, made concrete in his novels. Meredith's life was comparatively uneventful. He was born in 1828 at Portsmouth, the son of a naval outfitter. Early left an orphan, he was educated in Germany, and, returning to England, studied law, experimented in journalism, and fell in with a group of intellectuals led by Frederic Harrison and John Morley. He became literary adviser to the publishers Chapman and Hall; he edited for a short period _The Fortnightly Review_, and served abroad as correspondent for _The Morning Post_. But most of his maturity was passed in rural retirement in Surrey. He was twice married, at first unhappily to a daughter of the novelist, Thomas Love Peacock, and then more fortunately to a Miss Vulliamy, who bore him two children. His fame grew very slowly. Not until the age of sixty was he recognized as among the chief English novelists. But at the time of his death, in 1909, he was admittedly the foremost man of letters in Great Britain. II Meredith is first and last an intellectualist. Hence his preference for the psychological novel, for the novel of types, for the novel that is half essay, for the novel of distinctive style. Hence, also, his conception of the importance for the novelist of comedy and the comic spirit. Comedy, according to Meredith, is embodied mind, and its function is to expose violations of rational law. It is common sense chastising with the laughter of reason aberrations from the sensible. Comedy measures individual shortcomings by the social norm. It results from "the broad Alpine survey of the spirit born of our united social intelligence." It is "a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing." Comedy is thus refined rather than Rabelaisian; it is impartial rather than sentimental. It relies upon creating ideal figures that epitomize mankind in certain follies. It is typical and general in character, whereas tragedy is concerned primarily with the individual.