If Mrs. Meredith was a social leader, and she herself had no social standing at all, it was mainly because that lady was publicly recognized as a learned woman, and the world had not yet found out that she herself was anything but ignorant.

Had George Meredith been a Frenchman, what monographs had ere this been called forth by his work; in Germany, or Italy, or Denmark even, such gifts as his would long ago have found their classic place above further discussion.

Meredith is the novelist of men and women in the world of learning, of letters, and of politics; he is the satirist of social shams; and he is the sparkling epigrammatist; but he is also the optimist with the sane and vigorous message for his generation, and the realist who keeps a genuine rainbow of idealism in his sky.

In his poetry, Meredith is, however, more often the moralist and philosopher than the singer and simple narrator.

Meredith was a man of brilliant genius, which lent a fascination to his very mannerisms; but when these mannerisms are transferred by lesser men to a medium much less suited to themthat of the stagethe result is apt to be disastrous.

At one moment Mr. ELLIS sets out in detail the Meredithian genealogy, and shows that MEREDITH was the son and grandson of tailors and did not relish the relationship; at another moment he describes MEREDITH'S delightful and exuberantly youthful characteristics as a friend; and again he shows how badly MEREDITH behaved in regard to his first wife (though she was much more in fault), and also in regard to his first son, Arthur.

" "Maud Meredith is not my sister," he said, earnestly, "though Maud Willoughby may be.

Some of the best work of George Eliot, Reade, and Trollope was yet to make its appearance; Meredith and Hardy were still the treasured possession of the few; the reigning models during the period of Gissing's adolescence were probably Dickens and Trollope, and the numerous satellites of these great stars, prominent among them Wilkie Collins, William Black, and Besant and Rice.

George Meredith was the only child of a Welsh father and an Irish mother.

But one momentous fact at least is plain: We know from an authoritative quarter That MEREDITH was never "George" to SHORTER.

Mr. J.R. Meredith, engineer, of Pittsburg, Pa., is the inventor and builder, and has them in use in the U.S. engineering service.