uld have enabled
him to endure unmoved the attacks of conservatism and ignorance. He
kicked against the pricks and suffered for it. He was passionate,
impatient, and extreme; but what a lovely, irresistible genius! He was
never a society figure, and withdrew more and more from personal contact
with people; but he kept up to the last the ardor of his attack upon the
abuses of civilization--or what he deemed to be such. He fell into
some errors, but they were as nothing to the good he effected even in
external conditions; and the happiness and benefit he brought to tens of
thousands of readers by the fire, pathos, fun, sweetness, and--dramatic
animation of his stories, and by the nobility and lovableness of many
of the characters drawn in them, are immeasurable, and will touch us and
abide with us again when the welter of the present transition state has
passed. His devotion to the drama injured his style as a novelist, and
also led him to adopt a sort of staccato manner of construction and
statement which sometimes makes us smile. But upon the ground proper to
his genius Reade had no rival. A true and full biography of him, by a
man bold enough and broad enough to write it, would be a stirring book.

Bailey, the amiable mystical poet, whom my father mildly liked, was
another man my glimpses of whom came at a date much later than this.
He was a small, placid, gently beaming little philosopher, with a large
beard and an oval brow, and though he wrote several things besides
"Festus," they never detached themselves in the public mind from the
general theme of that production. Bailey himself seemed finally to have
recognized this, and he spent his later years (he lived to a great age)
in issuing continually fresh editions of his book, with expansions and
later thoughts, until it got to be a sort of philosophical library in
itself. He appeared in society in order to give his admirers opportunity
to offer up their grateful homage, and to settle for them all questions
relative to the meaning of man and of religion. No misgivings troubled
him; his smile was as an unintermittent summer noonday. He was
accompanied by his wife, with whom he seemed to be, as Tennyson
says, "twinned, like horse's ear and eye." She relieved him from the
embarrassing necessity of saying illuminative and eulogistic things
about himself and his great work. The book, upon its first publication,
was really read by appreciable numbers of persons; later, I thi