Platonic union. But the evidence is always doubtful.
The world is not possessed of abundant charity, nor does human
experience lead one to believe that intimate relations between a man
and a woman are compatible with Platonic friendship.

Perhaps no case is more puzzling than that which is found in the
life-history of Charles Reade and Laura Seymour.

Charles Reade belongs to that brilliant group of English writers and
artists which included Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Tom
Taylor, George Eliot, Swinburne, Sir Walter Besant, Maclise, and
Goldwin Smith. In my opinion, he ranks next to Dickens in originality
and power. His books are little read to-day; yet he gave to the English
stage the comedy "Masks and Faces," which is now as much a classic as
Goldsmith's "She Stoops to Conquer" or Sheridan's "School for Scandal."
His power as a novelist was marvelous. Who can forget the madhouse
episodes in Hard Cash, or the great trial scene in Griffith Gaunt, or
that wonderful picture, in The Cloister and the Hearth, of Germany and
Rome at the end of the Middle Ages? Here genius has touched the dead
past and made it glow again with an intense reality.

He was the son of a country gentleman, the lord of a manor which had
been held by his family before the Wars of the Boses. His ancestors had
been noted for their services in warfare, in Parliament, and upon the
bench. Reade, therefore, was in feeling very much of an aristocrat.
Sometimes he pushed his ancestral pride to a whimsical excess, very
much as did his own creation, Squire Raby, in Put Yourself in His Place.

At the same time he might very well have been called a Tory democrat.
His grandfather had married the daughter of a village blacksmith, and
Reade was quite as proud of this as he was of the fact that another
ancestor had been lord chief justice of England. From the sturdy strain
which came to him from the blacksmith he, perhaps, derived that
sledge-hammer power with which he wrote many of his most famous
chapters, and which he used in newspaper controversies with his
critics. From his legal ancestors there may have come to him the love
of litigation, which kept him often in hot water. From those who had
figured in the life of royal courts, he inherited a romantic nature, a
love of art, and a very delicate perception of the niceties of
cultivated usage. Such was Charles Reade--keen observer, scholar,
Bohemian--a man who could be both rough and tender, and w