iate his seniors beyond
their merits." I have always thought that very noble and modest and
well-said. Reade is the only one of the writers who in my own boyhood
were already reckoned great with whom it was my happiness to come into
personal contact.

I have met with but four men in my experience who have been
distinguished by that splendid urbanity of manner which was once thought
to express the acme of high breeding. Charles Reade was one of them. I
never knew him intimately enough to get beyond it, but that he
himself could break through it upon occasion was known to everybody. A
beautiful, stately cordiality commonly marked his social manner, but he
could be moved to a towering rage by an act of meanness, treachery or
oppression; and in his public correspondence he was sometimes downright
vitriolic. Hardly anything could have excused the retort he flung at
some unhappy disputant who had called one of his facts in question.
"You have dared," he wrote, "to contradict me on a subject in which I am
profoundly learned, while you are ignorant as dirt." It was true enough,
but perhaps it was hardly worth while to say it in that fashion. Nearly
all his life he was embroiled in controversy of one sort or another. He
spent himself in the exposure of abuses and the people whom he exposed
assailed him rashly. He took prodigious pains to be accurate, and before
he assaulted the prison system in _It's Never Too Late to Mend_, or the
conduct of private lunatic asylums in _Hard Cash_, he had gathered and
indexed huge volumes of information culled from every available source.
These memoranda he called _nigri loci_. His system of indexing was so
precise that he could lay an instant finger on any fact of which he was
in search, and nobody who ventured to impugn his facts escaped from him
unmutilated. In one instance, a barrister was so misguided as to tell
him publicly that a legal incident in one of the two books I have
mentioned was obviously impossible and absurd.

Reade was down upon him like a hammer: "The impossibility in question
disguised itself as fact and went through the hollow form of taking
place" on such and such a date, in such and such a court, and the
proceedings were recorded in volume so and so, on certain pages of the
official Law Reports for a given year. His adversary was left with no
better resource than to charge him with hurling undigested lumps
of official documents at the head of the public; and this left h