In the heart of the sixties (1863-4-6), the _Chronicles of Carlingford_ had seemed the promissory notes of a novelist of the absolutely first class in Mrs.Oliphant, though somehow the bills were rather renewed than met.

Others to be noticed immediately had come or were coming on.

Let us take a little more detailed notice of them.
In the cases of Mr.Meredith and of Mr.Hardy--not to speak of others on whom the bar still luckily rests--the "great ox" was, until the original composition of this book was actually finished, "on the tongue" of any one who does not disregard the good old literary brocard "_de_ vivis _nil nisi_ necessarium." You may and must criticise, with as much freedom as consists with courtesy, the successive stages of the work of the living master as he submits it to your judgment by publication.

But justice no less than courtesy demands that, until the work is finished, and sealed as a whole--till the _ne varietur_ and _ne plus ultra_ of death have been set on it--you shall abstain from a more general judgment, which can hardly be judicial, and which will have difficulty in steering between the fulsome if it be favourable and the uncivil if it be adverse.

Fortunately there was little difficulty in any of our three excepted cases.