BLACKMORE.  Richard Doddridge Blackrhore (1825—­1900) was a prolific writer, but he owes his fame almost entirely to one splendid novel, Lorna Doone, which was published in 1869.  The scene of this fascinating romance is laid in Exmoor in the seventeenth century.  The story abounds in romantic scenes and incidents; its descriptions of natural scenery are unsurpassed; the rhythmic language is at times almost equal to poetry; and the whole tone of the book is wholesome and refreshing.  Altogether it would be hard to find a more delightful romance in any language, and it well deserves the place it has won as one of the classics of our literature.  Other works of Blackmore which will repay the reader are Clara Vaughan (1864), his first novel, The Maid of Sker (1872), Springhaven (1887), Perlycross (1894), and Tales from the Telling House (1896); but none of these, though he counted them his best work, has met with the same favor as Lorna Doone.

MEREDITH.  So much does George Meredith (1828-1909) belong to our own day that it is difficult to think of him as one of the Victorian novelists.  His first notable work, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was published in 1859, the same year as George Eliot’s Adam Bede; but it was not till the publication of Diana of the Crossways in 1885, that his power as a novelist was widely recognized.  He resembles Browning not only in his condensed style, packed with thought, but also in this respect,—­that he labored for years in obscurity, and after much of his best work was published and apparently forgotten he slowly won the leading place in English fiction.  We are still too near him to speak of the permanence of his work, but a casual reading of any of his novels suggests a comparison and a contrast with George Eliot.  Like her, he is a realist and a psychologist; but while George Eliot uses tragedy to teach a moral lesson, Meredith depends more upon comedy, making vice not terrible but ridiculous.  For the hero or heroine of her novel George Eliot invariably takes an individual, and shows in each one the play of universal moral forces.  Meredith constructs a type-man as a hero, and makes this type express his purpose and meaning.  So his characters seldom speak naturally, as George Eliot’s do; they are more like Browning’s characters in packing a whole paragraph into a single sentence or an exclamation.  On account of his enigmatic style and his psychology, Meredith will never be popular; but by thoughtful men and women he will probably be ranked among our greatest writers of fiction.  The simplest and easiest of his novels for a beginner is The Adventures of Henry Richmond (1871).  Among the best of his works, besides the two mentioned above, are Beauchamp’s Career (1876) and The Egoist (1879).  The latter is, in our personal judgment, one of the strongest and most convincing novels of the Victorian Age.