adaptation from Shakespeare, who was ungallant enough to say, "A young
man married is a man that's marred." But a good and suitable wife would
have given _eclat_ to his social life.

His splendid courage and the manliness of his character always commanded
admiration, and his hatred of injustice and wrong, cant and hypocrisy,
was in harmony with the nobility and passionate earnestness of his
nature. He was the friend of the workingman, the poor, and the
oppressed; and he exposed the abuses of jails and lunatic-asylums and
trades-unions, and much besides, in the interest of humanity and as a
disinterested philanthropist. He fought, too, the battles of his
fellow-authors on the copyright questions with the same tremendous
energy that he displayed in his struggles for practical reform in other
directions; and as a practical reformer through his novels he, like
Dickens, accomplished a great deal of good. When moved by strong
impulses in this direction, he seemed indeed to write with a quivering
pen, dipped not in ink, but in fire and gall and blood, and to imbue
what he wrote with his own vital force and magnetic spirit.

Measuring his literary stature at a glance, it must, however, be
admitted that, notwithstanding his high average of excellence, he was a
very uneven writer, and hence between his worst and his best work there
is a wide distance in point of merit. But the best of his writings as
well deserves immortality as anything ever penned in fiction. Although
inferior to them in some respects, he was superior in epigrammatic
descriptive power to the most famous of his English and French
contemporaries, and particularly in his descriptions of what he had
never seen or experienced, but only read about. Take, for instance, his
Australian scenes in "It is Never Too Late to Mend," where the effect of
the song of the English skylark in the gold-diggings is told with
touching brevity and pathos. Yet all his information concerning
Australia had been gained by reading newspaper correspondence and books
on that country. He made no secret of this, and said in substance, as
frankly as he spoke of his scrap-books, "I read these to save me from
the usual trick of describing a bit of England and calling it the
antipodes." He could infuse life into the dry figures of a blue-book;
but in the mere portraiture of ordinary conventional society manners,
free from the sway of strong passions and emotions, he did not greatly
excel writers