George Eliot praised the novel as a work of genius', precious 'as an apple tree among the trees of the wood. She went on to say that Meredith's fantasy "has none of the tameness which belongs to mere imitations manufactured with servile effort or thrown off with simious facility. It is no patchwork of borrowed incidents. Mr. Meredith has not simply imitated Arabian fictions, he has been inspired by them; he has used oriental forms, but only as an oriental genius would have used them".