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.

And yet when one comes to consider the books critically, either one by
one, or in pairs and batches, or as a whole, it is somehow or other
difficult to pronounce any one exactly a masterpiece. There is a want of
"inevitableness" which sometimes amounts to improbability, as in the
case particularly of that most vivid and racy of books, _Cripps the
Carrier_, where the central incident or situation, though by no means
impossible, is almost insultingly unlikely, and forces its unlikeliness
on one at almost every moment and turn. Never, perhaps, was there a
better instance of that "possible-improbable" which contrasts so fatally
with the "probable-impossible." In not a few cases, too, there is that
reproduction of similar _denouements_ and crucial occurrences which is
almost necessary in a time when men write many novels. In almost all
there is a want of central interest in the characters that should be
central; in some an exaggeration of dialect; or of quaint non-dialectic
but also non-catholic locutions on the author's part. One rather hates
oneself for finding such faults--no one of which is absolutely fatal--in
a mass of work which has given, and continues to give, so much pleasure:
but the facts remain. One would not have the books _not_ written on any
account; but one feels that they were written rather because the author
chose to do so than because he could not help it. Now it is possible to
exaggerate the necessity of "mission" and the like: but, after all, _Ich
kann nicht anders_ must be to some extent the mood of mind of the man
who is committing a masterpiece.

Something of the sort is still more noticeable in the work of other
writers of the period. We have seen that two ladies of great talent,
Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Craik, began to write, long before Mr. Meredith
published _Ric