highest, can hardly be denied to Mr. Meredith: but it is genius marred,
perhaps by unfortunate education, certainly by undue egotism, by a
certain Celtic _tapage_, and by a too painful and elaborate endeavour to
be unlike other people.

A very interesting subject for examination from the present point of
view is Mr. Blackmore, because, on the one hand there is complete
_parrhesia_, and on the other (here at least) enthusiastic admiration.
Few of our modern novelists have combined so much scholarship with so
much command of mother wit and racy English, so much close study of
minor character and local speech with such wealth of romantic fancy;
such a thorough observance of "good form" with so complete a freedom
from priggishness and prudery. To this day there are lively
controversies whether he worked up the Doone story from local tradition
or made it "out of his own head." But whichever he did (and the present
historian owns that he cares very little about the point) the way in
which he has turned a striking, but not extraordinary, and certainly not
very extensive West Country glen into an _Arabian Nights_ valley, with
the figures and action of a mediæval 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