One side is vanquished according to decree of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be extinguished." Here undoubtedly there is something more than a simile, an image, or a _pointe_; there is a thought, and the author's admirers would, I suppose, rely triumphantly on it as a marriage of original thought and phrase.

But is it so?
Is the thought really anything more than the perfectly correct and obvious one that, if you let scandal alone it will die, or at least go into abeyance?
Does that thought really gain anything from being tricked out with not always very congruously arranged paraphernalia of Gods, and arenas, and reapers, and miners, and the People with a large P, and shrieks, and innocency, and the rest?
A palate or an appetite so jaded that it cannot appreciate thought put before it plainly, or so sluggish that it requires to be stung or puzzled into thinking, may derive some advantage.

But are these exactly the tastes and appetites that should be accepted as arbiters?
Again, partly through this perpetual mirage and steam-cloud of style, partly by other methods, Mr.Meredith manages, with consummate cleverness no doubt, to colour his whole representation of character and story in the same extra-natural way.

Take the rick-burning at the beginning of _Feverel_; take the famous wine scene (a very fascinating one, though I never heard anywhere else, in some researches on the subject, of port that would keep ninety years) in _The Egoist_.

The things may have happened this way in some Georgium Sidus, where the Comic Spirit has arranged the proper Fourth Dimension: but that is not the way they happen here.