le with whom it deals could not have
been other than it paints them would be to pretend to a knowledge
greater than the writer's own. But they are not the men and women with
whom we are familiar in real life, and they are not the men and women
with whom other writers of fiction have made us acquainted. Yet they are
indubitably human and alive, and we doubt them no more than the people
with whom we rub shoulders in the street. Dr. Conan Doyle once said
to me what I thought a memorable thing about this book; To read it, he
said, was 'like going through the Dark Ages with a dark lantern,' It
is so, indeed. You pass along the devious route from old Sevenbergen to
mediaeval Rome, and wherever the narrative leads you, the searchlight
flashes on everything, and out of the darkness and the dust and death of
centuries life leaps at you. And I know nothing in English prose which
for a noble and simple eloquence surpasses the opening and the closing
paragraphs of this great work, nor--with some naive and almost childish
passages of humour omitted--a richer, terser, purer, or more perfect
style than that of the whole narrative. Nowadays, the fashion in
criticism has changed, and the feeblest duffer amongst us receives
welcome ten times more enthusiastic and praise less measured than was
bestowed upon 'The Cloister and the Hearth' when it first saw the light.
Think only for a moment--think what would happen if such a book should
suddenly be launched upon us. Honestly, there _could_ be no reviewing
it. Our superlatives have been used so often to describe, at the best,
good, plain, sound work, and, at the worst, frank rubbish, that we have
no vocabulary for excellence of such a cast.

* It is worth while to record here a phrase used by Charles
Reade to me in reference to this work. He was rebutting the
charge of plagiarism which had been brought against him, and
he said laughingly, 'It is true that I milked three hundred
cows into my bucket, but the butter I churned was my own.'

And now, how comes it that with genius, scholarship, and style, with
laughter and terror and tears at his order, this great writer halts in
his stride towards the place which should be his by right? It seems to
me at times as if I had a partial answer to that question. I believe
that a judicious editor, without a solitary act of impiety, could give
Charles Reade undisputed and indisputable rank. One-half the whole
business is a ques