GEORGE MEREDITH.
George Meredith. By Walter Jerrold. (Greening and Co. Ss. 6d.)—We do not intend to appreciate Mr. Jerrold's "essay towards appreciation." Our readers do not need to be told that what Mr. Jerrold writes is sure to deserve consideration. Probably the differing judgments formed on Mr. Meredith's merits as a novelist come from differences of opinion about the novelist's function. If he is meant to be the anatomist of man's mental and moral nature, then Mr. Meredith is a typical novelist. But the world of readers, as a whole, ranges the novel in the class of belles lettres, and not in that of ethics and psychology. Most readers want to be amused, and neither the author nor his admirers, among whom, with a certain reserve, we desire to be included, would allow for a moment that this is to be sought in the books which Mr. Jerrold discusses. There are, it is true, some people who prefer "Evan Harrington" to all the other novels, precisely because it is capable of amusing, but their suffrages are not worth counting.
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