A slight modification of the recent Penrose and Lebowitz treatment of thermodynamic metastable states is presented. For the case of periodic boundary conditions, this modification allows the condition of metastability to be extended to all the metastable states in the van der Waals-Maxwell theory of the liquid-vapor phase transition, that is, for all states satisfyingf 0()+1/2 2>f(, 0+) andf0()+x>0 wheref(, 0+) is the (stable) Helmholtz free energy density of the generalized van der Waals-Maxwell theory andf 0() is the Helmholtz free energy density of a reference system with no long-range interaction, is a mean field-type term arising from a long-range Kac interaction, is the overall mean particle density, andx is any positive number. For the case of rigid-wall boundary conditions, a more restrictive condition is placed onx.