s friends and among the young, loses this air
of superiority, and becomes something of a radiant romp as well as an
Olympian. Lady Butcher's first meeting with him took place when she was a
girl of thirteen. She was going up Box Hill to see the sun rise with a
sixteen-year-old cousin, when the latter said: "I know a madman who lives
on Box Hill. He's quite mad, but very amusing; he likes walks and
sunrises. Let's go and shout him up!" It does Meredith credit that he got
out of bed and joined them, "his nightshirt thrust into brown trousers."
Even when the small girl insisted on "reading aloud to him one of the
hymns from Keble's _Christian Year_," he did not, as the saying is, turn a
hair. His attachment to his daughter Mariette--his "dearie girl," as he
spoke of her with unaffected softness of phrase--also helps one to
realize that he was not all Olympian. Meredith, the condemner of the
"guarded life," was humanly nervous in guarding his own little daughter.
"He would never allow Mariette to travel alone, even the very short
distance by train from Box Hill to Ewell; a maid had always to be sent
with her or to fetch her. He never allowed her to walk by herself." One
likes Meredith the better for Lady Butcher's picture of him as a "harassed
father."

One likes him, too, as he converses with his dogs, and for his
thoughtfulness in giving some of his MSS., including that of _Richard
Feverel_, to Frank Cole, his gardener, in the hope that "some day the
gardener would be able to sell them" and so get some reward for his
devotion. As to the underground passages in Meredith's life and character,
Lady Butcher is not concerned with them. She writes of him merely as she
knew him. Her book is a friend's tribute, though not a blind tribute. It
may not be effective as an argument against those who are bent on
disparaging the greatest lyrical wit in modern English literature. But it
will be welcomed by those for whom Meredith's genius is still a bubbling
spring of good sense and delight.

(3) THE ANGLO-IRISH ASPECT

Meredith never wrote a novel which was less a novel than _Celt and Saxon_.
It is only a fragment of a book. It is so much a series of essays and
sharp character-sketches, however, that the untimely fall of the curtain
does not greatly trouble us. There is no excitement of plot, no gripping
anxiety as to whether this or that pair of lovers will ever reach the
altar. Philip O'Donnell and Patrick, his devoted brother, an