ublic school education, but was elected first to a Demyship
and then to a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was called to
the Bar in 1842; but his Fellowship made him independent, and he pursued
many crazes--he was one of the most eccentric of those English authors
who are noticed in this volume--but no profession. He did not even begin
to write very early, and when he did it was drama, not prose or fiction.
He was not very successful with the stage, though he never quite gave it
up. It was about 1852 when he began to write, or at least to publish,
novels; and between the _Peg Woffington_ of that year and his death on
1st April 1884 he produced nearly a score, diversifying the publication
with law-suits, eccentric newspaper correspondences, and other things.
Indeed he has in more than one of his books introduced mental delusions
with such startling subtlety and truth, and was so entirely odd in the
ordinary relations of life, that some have not hesitated to insinuate a
slight want of sanity.

If there was any madness in him, the hackneyed alliance of great wits
was certainly not refused. A novelist of violent likes and dislikes
himself, he has found violent partisans and scornful pooh-poohers. Among
the former there is perhaps hardly one of his chief books--the quaint
and brilliant _Peg Woffington_, the pathetic _Christie Johnstone_, _Hard
Cash_, _Griffith Gaunt_, _Put Yourself in his Place_, _A Terrible
Temptation_, and the rest--which has not special sectaries. But catholic
criticism would undoubtedly put _It is Never too Late to Mend_ (1856)
and _The Cloister and the Hearth_ (1861) at the head of all. The former
is a tale of the moment, based chiefly on some stories which had got
abroad of tyranny in gaols, and on the Australian gold fever of a few
years earlier. The latter is a pure romance, purporting to tell the
adventures of Erasmus' father in the fifteenth century. The contrast of
these subjects illustrates admirably a curious combination in Reade's
genius which, for the matter of that, might be independently exemplified
from either book. On the one side he was one of the earliest and one of
the most industrious of those who have been called the "document" or
"reporter" novelists--now collecting enormous stores of newspaper
cuttings and busying himself with keenest interest in the things of the
day; now, as in _The Cloister and the Hearth_, not disdaining to impart
realism and vividness to his pictures b