its beauty; they are not reasonable mortals with the accumulated
perfections of three-score and ten, but young creatures just brimmed, as
young creatures are, with the blissfulness of being. Nobody ever
appreciated youth as this writer does, nobody has so entered into it;
he never fails, to be sure, to make you laugh at it a little, but all
the time he confesses a kind of loving worship of that buoyant time when
the effervescence of the animal spirits fills the brain with its happy
fumes, of that fearless, confident period that

"Is not, like Atlas, curled
Stooping 'neath the gray old world,
But which takes it, lithe and bland,
Easily in its small hand."

We have often wondered that no one ever before grappled with the
material of this last volume. The easy ability of one person to
incarcerate another in a mad-house is as often abused in America as in
England, and circumstances in this drama which might strike a casual
reader as preposterous we can match with kindred and more hopeless cases
within our own knowledge. Perhaps one of the ablest portions of the
treatment which this book affords the theme is in the singular
collocation of characters,--the hero being wrongfully imprisoned as
insane, the heroine's father really made so by medical malpractice, the
hero's sister dying of injuries received from another maniac, his uncle
being imbecile, and his father and one of his physicians becoming
monomaniac. Nicer shades than these allow could not be drawn, and the
subject stands in bold relief as a monument of dauntless courage and
enthusiasm.

No one can hesitate to declare this novel, as it is the latest, to be
also the finest of all that Charles Reade has given us. In saying this
we do not forget the "Cloister and Hearth," which, however tender and
touching and true to its century, is rather a rambling narrative than an
elucidated plot. "Very Hard Cash" is wrought out with the finest finish,
yet nowhere overdone; it so abounds in scenes of dramatic climax that we
fancy the stage has lost immensely by the romance-reader's gain; yet
there is never a single situation thrown away, every word tends in the
main direction, and after that the prolific mind of the writer overflows
in _marginalia_. There are one or two striking improbabilities, which
Mr. Reade himself excuses by asserting that the commonplace is neither
dramatic nor evangelical,--and therefore we confess, that, so long as
Reginald Bazalgette had a ship