ut that immortal book which I have ever since thought
memorable. "To read _The Cloister and the Hearth_" he declared, "is
like going through the Dark Ages with a dark lantern." And indeed the
criticism is true. You travel from old Sevenbergen to mediaeval Rome
and every man and woman you encounter on the way is indisputably
alive, though there is no he or she amongst them all who has a touch
of modernity. They are of their epoch, from Denys of Burgundy to the
Princess Claelia, from the _mijauree_ of the Tete D'Or to the tired
and polished old gentleman who for the time being presides over the
destinies of the Church of Rome. Here, for once, a prodigious faculty
for taking pains is used with genius, and the chances are that the
author of this monumental work, despised as he too often was as a
mere sensationalist in his own day, will survive a score of his
contemporaries who are even at this hour, by common critical consent,
placed over him.

He was always fighting against some legal oppression. In the latest case
in which I knew him to be engaged, an attempt had been made by a wealthy
ground landlord to squeeze an unprotected widow lady out of her rights
and to compel her to surrender the house and grounds which had belonged
to her deceased husband. With the impetuosity which distinguished him in
such matters, Reade flung himself into the conflict. It was enough for
him to know that an injustice was being done or attempted to fire him at
the centre. He caused to be inscribed on the outer wall of the garden
of the mansion in dispute the words, "Naboth's Vineyard," and he used to
relate with great glee how a Jew old clothesman one day translated this
into "Naboth's Vinegar," and after a wondering reading of it, said:
"Good Lord! I should have taken it for a gentlemanth houth." "From
which," said Reade, quaintly, "you may conclude that Houndsditch thumbs
not the annals of Samaria!"

That shapeless production _Grace Forbeach_ had one idea in it which I
was able to use later on to some advantage. In those days a writer of
fiction expended much more care upon the actual mechanism of his plot
than seems to be thought necessary nowadays. Even a man of the genius of
Charles Dickens did not feel himself at liberty to work untrammelled by
the exigencies of some intricate and harassing framework of invention on
which he made it his business to hang all his splendours of description
and his observation of human character. The power