t your own intelligence has been affronted.
Surely you had imagination enough to feel the significance of the line
without this meretricious trick to aid you. It is not the business of
a great master in fiction to jog the elbow of the unimaginative, and
to say, 'Wake up at this,' or 'Here it is your duty to the narrative to
experience a thrill.'

Another and an equally characteristic fault, though of far less frequent
occurrence, is Reade's fashion of intruding himself upon his reader.
He stands, in a curiously irritating way, between the picture he has
painted and the man he has invited to look at it. In one instance he
drags the eye down to a footnote in order that you may read: 'I, C. R.,
say this'--which is very little more or less than an impertinence. The
sense of humour which probably twinkled in the writer's mind is faint at
the best. We know that he, C. R., said that. We are giving of our time
and intelligence to C. R., and we are rather sorry than otherwise to
find him indulging in this small buffoonery.

It should, I think, be an instruction to future publishers of Charles
Reade to give him Christian printing--to confine him in the body of
his narrative to one fount of type, and rigorously to deny him the use
(except in their accustomed and orthodox places) of capitals, small
capitals, and italics. And I cannot think that any irreverence could be
charged against an editor who had the courage to put a moist pen through
those expressions of egotism and naive self-satisfaction and vanity
which do occasionally disfigure his pages.

I ask myself if these trifles--for in comparison with the sum of Reade's
genius they are small things indeed--can in any reasonable measure
account for the neglect which undoubtedly besets him. In narrative
vigour he has but one rival--Dumas _pere_--and he is far and away the
master of that rival in everything but energy. No male writer surpasses
him in the knowledge of feminine human nature. There is no love-making
in literature to beat the story of the courtship of Julia Dodd and
Alfred Hardy in 'Hard Cash.' In mere descriptive power he ranks with the
giants. Witness the mill on fire in 'The Cloister and the Hearth'; the
lark in exile in 'Never too Late to Mend'; the boat-race in 'Hard Cash';
the scene of Kate Peyton at the firelit window, and Griffith in the
snow, in 'Griffith Gaunt.' There are a thousand bursts of laughter in
his pages, not mere sniggers, but lung-shaking laughte