is
equanimity undisturbed.

But it was when they charged him with plagiarism that his critics hit
him on the raw. About the time when I first knew him somebody started a
controversy with respect to his story of _The Wandering Heir_, and the
accusation was made that he had lifted a page or two out of Swift's
_Polite Conversations_. "Of course I did," said Reade to me, "but the
essence of a plagiarism is that it shall have some chance of going
undetected; it is the appropriation to one's self of the property of
another with the intent to display it as one's own, and to me it was
impossible to suppose that a writer like Dean Swift was so obscure that
I could play a trick like that with him with impunity. A recognisable
quotation is not a plagiarism. They brought the same charge against me
because I translated the etchings of Corot into accurate English. The
sources I tapped for _The Cloister and the Hearth_ are open to anybody,
and any man who chooses may study them and make a romance out of them if
he can. It is perfectly true that I milked three hundred cows into that
bucket, but the butter I churned was my own." It seems scarcely fair to
have brought such an accusation against a writer who not only made
no disguise of his literary methods, but who so openly proclaimed and
defended them.

In the last page of _The Cloister and the Hearth_ he acknowledges his
debt to the great Erasmus, for example, in these very noble and eloquent
phrases:--"Some of the best scenes in this new book are from his
mediaeval pen and illumine the pages where they come; for the words of
a genius so high as his are not born to die: their immediate work upon
mankind fulfilled, they may seem to lie torpid; but at each fresh shower
of intelligence Time pours upon her students, they prove their immortal
race; they revive, they spring from the dust of great libraries; they
bud, they flower, they fruit, they seed from generation to generation,
and from age to age." The professional critics have never been just to
Reade, but it is a fact that I have never encountered a workman in the
craft of fiction who did not reckon him a master among the masters. It
has long seemed to me that _The Cloister and the Hearth_ is, in fiction,
the only real revival of a dead age in the whole range of imaginative
literature. When Mr Conan Doyle, as he then was, was lecturing in the
United States, we met one evening at the Parker House in Boston, and he
said one thing abo