iffith
Gaunt_ is marred by an insincerity in the plot which vitiates, and is
at once felt to vitiate, the whole work. On everything he wrote before
and after _The Cloister_ Reade's essential vulgarity of mind is
written large. That he shook it off in that great instance is one of
the miracles of literary history. It may be that the sublimity of his
theme kept him throughout in a state of unnatural exaltation. If the
case cannot be explained thus, it cannot be explained at all. Other of
his writings display the same, or at any rate a like, capacity for
sustained narrative. _Hard Cash_ displays it; parts of _It is Never
Too Late to Mend_ display it. But over much of these two novels lies
the trail of that defective taste which makes _A Simpleton_, for
instance, a prodigy of cheap ineptitude.

But if Reade be hopelessly Scott's inferior in manner and taste, what
shall we say of the invention of the two men? Mr. Barrie once affirmed
very wisely in an essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, "Critics have said
enthusiastically--for it is difficult to write of Mr. Stevenson
without enthusiasm--that Alan Breck is as good as anything in Scott.
Alan Breck is certainly a masterpiece, quite worthy of the greatest of
all story-tellers, _who, nevertheless, it should be remembered,
created these rich side characters by the score, another before
dinner-time_." Inventiveness, is, I suppose, one of the first
qualities of a great novelist: and to Scott's invention there was no
end. But set aside _The Cloister_; and Reade's invention will be found
to be extraordinarily barren. Plot after plot turns on the same old
tiresome trick. Two young people are in love: by the villainy of a
third person they are separated for a while, and one of the lovers is
persuaded that the other is dead. The missing one may be kept missing
by various devices; but always he is supposed to be dead, and always
evidence is brought of his death, and always he turns up in the end.
It is the same in _The Cloister_, in _It is Never Too Late to Mend_,
in _Put Yourself in His Place_, in _Griffith Gaunt_, in _A Simpleton_.
Sometimes, as in _Hard Cash_ and _A Terrible Temptation_, he is
wrongfully incarcerated as a madman; but this is obviously a variant
only on the favorite trick. Now the device is good enough in a tale of
the fourteenth century, when news travelled slowly, and when by the
suppression of a letter, or by a piece of false news, two lovers, the
one in Holland, the