refuge in dialect. Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn-
tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things. Mr. Marion
Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is
like the lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about "le beau ciel
d'Italie." Besides, he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering moral
platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and
that to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying. _Robert
Elsmere_ is of course a masterpiece--a masterpiece of the "genre
ennuyeux," the one form of literature that the English people seems
thoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that
it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in
the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we can quite believe it.
Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England
is the home of lost ideas. As for that great and daily increasing school
of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East-End, the only
thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave
it raw.--_The Decay of Lying_.




THE QUALITY OF GEORGE MEREDITH


Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by
flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except
language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an
artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody in
Shakespeare--Touchstone, I think--talks about a man who is always
breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might