innings. That part of His work, indeed, is purely and wholly epic
in sentiment and discernment, however colloquial in form, and it is
the sole example of its kind, since it was written by one who was
contemporary with the events described.

Reade was pretty constantly at war with his critics, but he fairly
justified himself of the reviewer in his own day, and at this time the
people who assailed him have something like a right to sleep in peace.
In private life one of the most amiable of men, and distinguished for
courtesy and kindness, he was a swash-buckler in controversy. He had a
trick of being in the right which his opponents found displeasing,
and he was sometimes cruel in his impatience of stupidity and
wrong-headedness. Scarcely any continuance in folly could have
inspired most men to the retorts he occasionally made. He wrote to one
unfortunate: 'Sir,--You have ventured to contradict me on a question
with regard to which I am profoundly learned, where you are ignorant
as dirt.' It was quite true, but another kind of man would have found
another way of saying it.

That trick of being right came out with marked effect in the discussion
which accompanied the issue of 'Hard Cash' in 'All the Year Round,' A
practitioner in lunacy condemned one of the author's statements as a
bald impossibility. Reade answered that the impossibility in question
disguised itself as fact, and went through the hollow form of taking
place on such and such a date in such and such a public court, and was
recorded in such and such contemporary journals. Whenever he made a
crusade against a public evil, as when he assailed the prison system,
or the madhouse system, or the system of rattening in trades unions, his
case was supported by huge collections of indexed fact, and in the fight
which commonly followed he could appeal to unimpeachable records; but
again and again the angry fervour of the advocate led people to forget
or to distrust the judicial accuracy on which his case invariably
rested.

When all is said and done, his claim to immortality lies less in the
books which deal with the splendours and the scandals of his own
age than in that monument of learning, of humour, of pathos, and of
narrative skill, 'The Cloister and the Hearth.'* It is not too much to
say of this book that, on its own lines, it is without a rival. To the
reader it seems to be not less than the revival of a dead age. To assert
dogmatically that the bygone peop