14th February.
Ir is generally conceded that there is no great living English novelist. George Meredith's early work was full of promise, but he has gradually allowed his undoubted ability to be overlaid by affectation to such an extent that he is unintelligible to the masses. He has a following of devotees who still regard him as a great writer, but as soon as.an author becomes the idol of a sect he loses his influence with the great body of outsiders with whom the right to make a man famous ultimately rests. The ability that concentrated in one jan would make him as great as Dickens and Thackeray are is now divided among a large number of second-class writers, whose books we can take up with the assurance that they will be good reading. We have before us at the present moment nine such books, by nine different writers, all very good in their way, one or two of ticm almost first-rate. We may premise that most of them have been sent us by Messrs. Kelly Walsh, Ld. We take the authors in alphabetical order.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.