bestir himself in the case of a person whom he believed to be unjustly confined in a lunatic asylum, as energetically as he makes Dr. Sampson do in "Hard Cash," and with equal success. Most of the scenes he describes, in England at least, have thus in some way fallen in to be part of his own experience. Whatever he undertakes to do he does with a tremendous earnestness. His method of workmanship is, I believe, something like that of Mr. Wilkie Collins, but of course the object is totally different. Wilkie Collins collects all the remarkable police cases and other judicial narratives he can find, and makes what Jean Paul Richter called "quarry" of them--a vast accumulation of materials in which to go digging for subjects and illustrations at leisure. Charles Reade does the same with blue-books and the reports of official inquiries. The author of the "Dead Secret" is looking for perplexing little mysteries of human crime; the author of "Hard Cash" for stories of legal or social wrong to be redressed. I need hardly say, perhaps, that I rank Charles Reade high above Wilkie Collins. The latter can string his dry bones on wires with remarkable ingenuity; the former can, as he fairly boasts, make the dry bones live. Meanwhile, let us follow out the progress of Mr. Charles Reade as a literary influence. He grows to have a distinct place and power in England quite independently of the reviewers, and at last the very storm of controversy which his books awaken compels the reviewers themselves to take him into account. "It is Never Too Late to Mend" raised a clamor among prison disciplinarians. Years after its publication it is brought out as a drama in London, and its first appearance creates a sort of riot in the Princess's Theatre. Hostile critics rise in the stalls and denounce it; supporters and admirers vehemently defend it; speeches are made on either side. Mr. Reade plunges into the arena of controversy a day or two after in the newspapers, assails one of the critics by name, and charges him with having denounced the piece in the theatre, and applauded his own denunciation in the journal for which he wrote. Some friend of the critic replies by the assertion that one of Mr. Reade's most enthusiastic literary supporters is Mr. Reade's own nephew. All this sort of thing is dreadfully undignified, but it brings an author at all events into public notice, and it did for Mr. Reade what I am convinced he would have disdained to do consciously--it "puffed" his books. An amusing story is told in connection with the production of this drama. An East End manager thought of bringing it out. (The East End, I need hardly say, is the lower and poorer quarter of London.) This manager came and studied the piece as produced at the West End. One of the strong scenes, the sensation scene, was a realistic exhibition of prison discipline. The West End had been duly impressed and thrilled with this scene. But the East End manager shook his head. "It would