George Meredith
The Times in a leading article says (Jany. 3, 1899) “a talker,” as Mr. George Meredith has somewhere said, “involves the existence of a talkee,” or words to this effect.
I said what comes to the same thing as this in Life and Habit in 1877, and I repeated it in the preface to my translation of the Iliad in 1898. I do not believe George Meredith has said anything to the same effect, but I have read so very little of that writer, and have so utterly rejected what I did read, that he may well have done so without my knowing it. He damned Erewhon, as Chapman and Hall’s reader, in 1871, and, as I am still raw about this after 28 years, (I am afraid unless I say something more I shall be taken as writing these words seriously) I prefer to assert that the Times writer was quoting from my preface to the Iliad, published a few weeks earlier, and fathering the remark on George Meredith. By the way the Times did not give so much as a line to my translation in its “Books of the Week,” though it was duly sent to them.