y adapting and almost translating
whole passages from Erasmus' own _Colloquies_. On the other, he was a
poetic seer and dreamer, of the strongest romantic force, and capable of
extraordinary flights of power, passion, and pathos. But there was
another thing that he was _not_, and that was a critic. His taste and
judgment were extremely deficient; he had no sense of general proportion
in his work; and was quite as likely to be melodramatic as to be
tragical, to be coarse as to be strong, to be tedious as to be amusing,
to be merely revolting as to purify by pity and terror. Both the books
just specially mentioned may be thought too long: it is certain that
_The Cloister and the Hearth_ is. That a freshness still evident in
_Christie Johnstone_ has been lost in both (having been killed by "the
document") is also true. But still, Reade undoubtedly had genius, and to
genius most things can without much trouble be forgiven.

The chief novelist of what is rather loosely called the School of
Dickens, was Wilkie Collins, son of the painter of that name, who was
born in London on 8th January 1824, and died in 1889. His greatest
popularity was in the decade between 1857 and 1866, when _The Dead
Secret_, _The Woman in White_, _No Name_, and _Armadale_, especially the
second, had an immense vogue. Perhaps _The Moonstone_, which is later,
is also better than any of these. The strictly literary merit of none
could be put high, and the method, that of forwarding the result by a
complicated intertwist of letters and narratives, though it took the
public fancy for a time, was clumsy; while the author followed his
master in more than one aberration of taste and sentiment. His brother
Charles Collins, who had a much shorter life, had a much more delicate
style and fancy; and the _Cruise upon Wheels_, a record of an actual
tour slightly embellished and thrown into fictitious form, is one of the
books which have, and are not, unless they drop entirely out of sight,
likely to lose, a firm following of friends, few perhaps but faithful.
Mortimer Collins, a contemporary, but no relation of these, whose poems
have already been mentioned, was born in 1827 and died in 1876, the last
twenty years of his life having been occupied by various and voluminous
literary work. He was one of the last of the so-called Bohemian school
in letters and journalism, something of a scholar, a fertile novelist,
and a versatile journalist in most of the kinds which m