Excerpt from Up to Midnight Plato to the present day contributor no fair opportunity to create an imaginary group of super-keen conversationalists, who, from sup posedly different angles of personality, bat tledore and shuttle-cock current opinion between them, is allowed to escape. With high hopes he sets his stage and with a grow ing conviction of the importance and diver sity of his characters he leads on one mario nette after another until the group is com plete, and then proceeds to pull the strings. It is great fun, to be sure. Meredith said so when he began with Up to Midnight. They all say so and mean it. But somehow the audience quickly finds itself yawning, and the author in time, though to be sure the last of all, finds that it takes but a very short time for his play-people to in-breed, or in - write, to a single type, that he is expressing himself in the same key through half a dozen mouths and that the fun of pulling the strings is hardly compensating. Then, too, the long-suffering editor and publisher the first to notice the empty benches, has a limit of patience and calls a halt. The obsequies are usually brief, though thorough. In the case of Up to Midnight this was particularly so. So thorough, indeed, that the editor of Meredith's complete works omits it entirely, and his bibliographer with far less excuse does likewise. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.