It is not unamusing to those who regarded Mr. Meredith during almost his whole career with those mingled feelings of the highest admiration and of critical reserve which this notice has endeavoured to express, to note a new phase which seems to be coming over the youngest criticism.  The original want of appreciation has passed, never, one may hope, to return; and the middle engouement, which was mainly engineered by those doughty partisans, Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Henley, is passing likewise.  But the most competent and generous juniors seem to be a little uncomfortable, to have to take a good deal on trust, and not quite to “like the security.”  To those who know the history of critical opinion these signs speak pretty clearly, though not so as to authorise them to anticipate the final judgment absolutely.  Genius, all but of the highest, can hardly be denied to Mr. Meredith:  but it is genius marred, perhaps by unfortunate education, certainly by undue egotism, by a certain Celtic tapage, and by a too painful and elaborate endeavour to be unlike other people.

A very interesting subject for examination from the present point of view is Mr. Blackmore, because, on the one hand there is complete parrhesia, and on the other (here at least) enthusiastic admiration.  Few of our modern novelists have combined so much scholarship with so much command of mother wit and racy English, so much close study of minor character and local speech with such wealth of romantic fancy; such a thorough observance of “good form” with so complete a freedom from priggishness and prudery.  To this day there are lively controversies whether he worked up the Doone story from local tradition or made it “out of his own head.”  But whichever he did (and the present historian owns that he cares very little about the point) the way in which he has turned a striking, but not extraordinary, and certainly not very extensive West Country glen into an Arabian Nights valley, with the figures and action of a mediaeval romance and the human interest of a modern novel, is really wonderful.  And there is hardly a book of his last thirty years’ production, from Clara Vaughan to Perlycross, which has not vigour, variety, character, “race” enough for half a dozen.  In such books, for example, as The Maid of Sker and Cripps the Carrier the idiosyncrasy is extraordinary:  the quaint and piquant oddity of phrase and apophthegm is as vivid as Dickens, rather more real, and tinged somehow with a flavour of literature, even of poetry, which was Dickens’s constant lack.