like Bulwer Lytton, who once said to me, "I think more of
my poems and 'The Lady of Lyons' and 'Richelieu' than of all my novels,
from 'Pelham' to 'What will he do with it?'" (which was the last he had
then written). "A poet's fame is lasting, a novelist's is comparatively
ephemeral." Moved by a similar sentiment, Reade once said, "The most
famous name in English literature and all literature is a dramatist's;
and what pygmies Fielding and Smollett, and all the modern novelists,
from Dickens, the head and front of them, down to that milk-and-water
specimen of mediocrity, Anthony Trollope, seem beside him!"[1]

He had little taste for poetry, because of his strong preference for
prose as a vehicle of thought and expression. He, however, greatly
admired Byron, Shelley, and Scott, and paid a passing compliment to
Swinburne, except as to the too fiery amatory ardor of his first poems;
but he considered Tennyson, with all his polish, little better than a
versifier, and said his plays of "Dora" and "The Cup" would have been
"nice enough as spectacles without words." For those great masters of
prose fiction and dramatic art, Victor Hugo and Dumas _pere_, he had
unbounded admiration, and of the former in particular he always spoke
with enthusiasm as the literary giant of his age, and to him,
notwithstanding his extravagances, assigned the first place among
literary Frenchmen. Dumas he ranked second, except as a dramatist; and
here he believed him to be without a superior among his contemporaries.

For several years after I came to New York Charles Reade and I kept up a
close friendly correspondence, and he sent me proof-sheets of "The
Cloister and the Hearth" in advance of its publication in England, so
that the American reprint of the work might appear simultaneously
therewith, which it did through my arrangements with Rudd & Carleton. He
also sent me two of his own plays,--"Nobs and Snobs" and "It is Never
Too Late to Mend," drawn from his novel of that name,--in the hope that
the managers of some of the American theatres would produce them; but,
notwithstanding their author's fame, their own superior merit, and my
personal efforts, the expectation was disappointed, owing, as Mr. Reade
said, to their preferring to steal rather than to buy plays,--a charge
only too well sustained by the facts. Another play, written by a friend
of his, that he sent me, met with a like reception.

The first letter I received from Charles Reade