tered about all of them; and it is certainly much more required
there. Indeed as far as the narrow sense of "style" goes, the
peculiarity, whether they admit it to be a fault or not, is practically
admitted as a fact by all but Meredith-monomaniacs. Here is a _sors
Meredithiana_, taken from _Rhoda Fleming_, one of the simplest of the
books:--

"Algernon waited dinnerless until the stealthy going minutes distended
and swelled monstrous and horrible as viper-bitten bodies, and the
venerable Signior Time became of unhealthy hue."

To match that--it would be exceedingly easy to match and beat it out of
the author himself--you must go to the maddest of the seventeenth-century
metaphysicals--say to Edward Benlowes himself. But this is nothing: it is
at worst an obvious playful exaggeration, very like some things of
Dickens's own transposed into another key. But take this opening of
the fifteenth chapter of _Diana of the Crossways_:--

"The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our poor stripped
individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they are
reapers; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to bruise
us: they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and made
presentable while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion. It is of
course less than magnanimity; they are not proposed to you for your
worship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, their
parent human mass of the hour. But they have one worshipful element in
them, which is, the divine insistency upon there being two sides to a
case--to every case. And the People so far directed by them may boast of
healthfulness. Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, have
in honesty to admit the fact. One side is vanquished according to decree
of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be extinguished."

Here undoubtedly there is something more than a simile, an image, or a
_pointe_; there is a thought, and the author's admirers would, I
suppose, rely triumphantly on it as a marriage of original thought and
phrase. But is it so? Is the thought really anything more than the
perfectly correct and obvious one that, if you let scandal alone it will
die, or at least go into abeyance? Does that thought really gain
anything from being tricked out with not always very congruously
arranged paraphernalia of Gods, and arenas, and reapers, and miners, and
the People with a large P, and shrieks, and innocency,