t the best new thing, and rather American. If you
hear of any scrap-books containing copious extracts from American
papers, I am open to purchase at a fair price, especially if the
extracts are miscellaneous and dated, and, above all, if classified. I
shall, also be grateful if you will tell me whether there is not a
journal that reports trials, and send me a specimen. Command me whenever
you think I can be of an atom of use to you."

Charles Reade's letters were always highly characteristic of him. In
these he mentally photographed himself, for he always wrote with candid
unreserve, whether to friend or foe, and he liked to talk with the pen.
Both by nature and education he was fitted for a quiet, studious,
scholarly life, and with pen and paper and books he was always at home.
He liked, too, at intervals the cloister-like life he led at Magdalen
College. With nothing to disturb him in his studies and his work, with
glimpses of bright green turf and umbrageous recesses and gray old
buildings with oriel windows that were there before England saw the Wars
of the Roses, his environment was picturesque, and his bursar's cap and
gown became him well, yet seemed to remove him still further from the
busy world and suggest some ecclesiastical figure of the fifteenth
century. He was a D.C.L., and known as Dr. Reade in the college, just as
if he had never written a novel or a play and had been untrumpeted by
fame.

There, in his rooms on "Staircase No. 2," with "Dr. Reade" over the
door, he labored _con amore_. Indeed, he was amid more congenial
surroundings and more truly in his element in the atmosphere of the
ancient university than in London or anywhere else. By both nature and
habit he was more fitted to enjoy the cloister than the hearth, although
he by no means undervalued the pleasures of society and domestic life.
The children of his brain--his own works--seemed to be the only ones he
cared for; and, loving and feeling proud of his literary family, he was
mentally satisfied. Yet no man was a keener observer of home-life, and
his portraiture of women and analysis of female character, although
unvarying as to types, were singularly true and penetrating. His
Fellowship was the principal cause of his never marrying, the next most
important one being that he was always wedded to his pen; and
literature, like law, is a jealous mistress. He had some idea of this
kind when he said, "An author married is an author marred,"--an