an "Tragic Comedians," more pretentious, more blatant; it struts and
screams, stupid in all its gaud and absurdity as a cockatoo. More than
fifty pages I could not read.

How, I asked myself, could the man who wrote the "Nuptials of Attila" write
this? but my soul returned no answer, and I listened as one in a hollow
mountain side. My opinion of George Meredith never ceases to puzzle me. He
is of the north, I am of the south. Carlyle, Mr. Robert Browning, and
George Meredith are the three essentially northern writers; in them there
is nothing of Latin sensuality and subtlety.

I took up "Rhoda Fleming." I found some exquisite bits of description in
it, but I heartily wished them in verse, they were motives for poems; and
there was some wit. I remember a passage very racy indeed, of middle-class
England. Antony, I think is the man's name, describes how he is interrupted
at his tea; a paragraph of seven or ten lines with "I am having my tea, I
am at my tea," running through it for refrain. Then a description of a
lodging-house dinner: "a block of bread on a lonely plate, and potatoes
that looked as if they had committed suicide in their own steam." A little
ponderous and stilted, but undoubtedly witty. I read on until I came to a
young man who fell from his horse, or had been thrown from his horse, I
never knew which, nor did I feel enough interest in the matter to make
research; the young man was put to bed by his mother, and once in bed he
began to talk!... four, five, six, ten pages of talk, and such talk! I can
offer no opinion why Mr. George Meredith committed them to paper; it is not
narrative, it is not witty, nor is it sentimental, nor is it profound. I
read it once; my mind astonished at receiving no sensation cried out like a
child at a milkless breast. I read the pages again ... did I understand?
Yes, I understood every sentence, but they conveyed no idea, they awoke no
emotion in me; it was like sand, arid and uncomfortable. The story is
surprisingly commonplace--the people in it are as lacking in subtlety as
those of a Drury Lane melodrama.

"Diana of the Crossways" I liked better, and had I had absolutely nothing
to do I might have read it to the end. I remember a scene with a rustic--a
rustic who could eat hog a solid hour--that amused me. I remember the
sloppy road in the Weald, and the vague outlines of the South Downs seen in
starlight and mist. But to come to the great question, the test by which
Time