GEORGE MEREDITH.

It seems strange that such a brilliant scholar and clever writer, as Mr. George Meredith undoubtedly is, should have had almost a half-dozen lives as a novelist, and yet for the first time in his career and late in life make a commercial success out of works of fiction not half worthy of his name and reputation as a writer. He has always written well, if not always wisely, at least, from a popular point of view; but most of his fiction has been so much over the heads of ordinary readers that they have passed by many of his novels with little notice. And yet now and then during the last thirty or forty years he has written a work of fiction that has sold fairly well, and has just created a little demand for his older novels. But if his late fiction has made him a commercial success, he must even now be a disappointed novelist, for if he cared to parade in advertisements all the good press notices he has had, he could, I think, in that way show that he has been almost the best-noticed novelist of the last half century. I think his first volume of stories, called “The Shaving of Shagpat,” gave him little or no profit, and his capital novel, “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,” did not bring him nearly a fortune.