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.