f the thorough-going enthusiast, and not after
that of the sluggard. He made up his mind to write fiction, and he
practised for years before he printed a line. He assured himself of
methods of selection and of forms of expression. Better equipped by
nature than one in a hundred of those who follow the profession he had
chosen he laboured with a fiery, unresting patience to complete his
armoury, and to perfect himself in the handling of its every weapon. He
read omnivorously, and, throughout his literary lifetime, he made it
his business to collect and to collate, to classify and to catalogue,
innumerable fragments of character, of history, of current news, of
evanescent yet vital stuffs of all sorts. In the last year but one of
his life he went with me over some of the stupendous volumes he had
built in this way. The vast books remain as an illustration of his
industry, but only one who has seen him in consultation with their pages
can guess the accuracy and intimacy of his knowledge of their contents.
They seem to deal with everything, and with whatever they enclosed he
was familiar.

This encyclopaedic industry would have left a commonplace man
commonplace, and in the estimate of a great man's genius it takes rank
merely as a characteristic. His sympathy for his chosen craft was backed
by a sympathy for humanity just as intense and impassioned. He was a
glorious lover and hater of lovable and hateful things.

In one respect he was almost unique amongst men, for he united a savage
detestation of wrong with a most minute accuracy in his judgment of its
extent and quality. He laboured in the investigation of the problems
of his own age with the cold diligence of an antiquary. He came to a
conclusion with the calm of a great judge. And when his cause was sure
he threw himself upon it with an extraordinary and sustained energy. The
rage of his advocacy is in surprising contrast with the patience exerted
in building up his case.

Reade had a poet's recognition for the greatness of his own time. He saw
the epic nature of the events of his own hour, the epic character of the
men who moulded those events. Hundreds of years hence, when federated
Australia is thickly sown with great cities, and the island-continent
has grown to its fulness of accomplished nationhood, and is grey in
honour, Reade's nervous English, which may by that time have grown
quaint, and only legible to learned eves, will preserve; the history of
its beg