ure,
there could be no competent doubt of his great powers. Mr. Blackmore had
made his late beginning some time before: and had just caught the public
ear unmistakably with _Lorna Doone_ (1869). Mr. Hardy was on the eve of
catching it with the new and powerful attractions of _Under the
Greenwood Tree_ (1872). In the heart of the sixties (1863-4-6), the
_Chronicles of Carlingford_ had seemed the promissory notes of a
novelist of the absolutely first class in Mrs. Oliphant, though somehow
the bills were rather renewed than met. Others to be noticed immediately
had come or were coming on. Let us take a little more detailed notice of
them.

In the cases of Mr. Meredith and of Mr. Hardy--not to speak of others on
whom the bar still luckily rests--the "great ox" was, until the original
composition of this book was actually finished, "on the tongue" of any
one who does not disregard the good old literary brocard "_de_ vivis
_nil nisi_ necessarium." You may and must criticise, with as much
freedom as consists with courtesy, the successive stages of the work of
the living master as he submits it to your judgment by publication. But
justice no less than courtesy demands that, until the work is finished,
and sealed as a whole--till the _ne varietur_ and _ne plus ultra_ of
death have been set on it--you shall abstain from a more general
judgment, which can hardly be judicial, and which will have difficulty
in steering between the fulsome if it be favourable and the uncivil if
it be adverse. Fortunately there was little difficulty in any of our
three excepted cases. As has been already hinted in one case, the chorus
of praise, ever since it made itself heard, has not been quite
unchequered. It has been objected both to Mr. Meredith and to Mr. Hardy
that there is in them a note, perhaps to be detected also generally in
the later fiction which they have so powerfully influenced--the note of
a certain _perversity_--of an endeavour to be peculiar in thought, in
style, in choice of subject, in handling of it; in short in general
attitude. And with this has been connected--not in their cases with
any important or really damaging effect, though undoubtedly so in regard
to some of their followers--a suggestion that this "perversity" is the
note of a waning period--that just as the excessive desire to be _like_
all the best models is the note of Classical decadence, so the excessive
desire to be _unlike_ everything else is the note of Romant