Surely you had imagination enough to feel the significance of the line without this meretricious trick to aid you. It is not the business of a great master in fiction to jog the elbow of the unimaginative, and to say, ‘Wake up at this,’ or ‘Here it is your duty to the narrative to experience a thrill.’ Another and an equally characteristic fault, though of far less frequent occurrence, is Reade’s fashion of intruding himself upon his reader. He stands, in a curiously irritating way, between the picture he has painted and the man he has invited to look at it. In one instance he drags the eye down to a footnote in order that you may read: ‘I, C. R., say this’--which is very little more or less than an impertinence. The sense of humour which probably twinkled in the writer’s mind is faint at the best. We know that he, C. R., said that. We are giving of our time and intelligence to C. R., and we are rather sorry than otherwise to find him indulging in this small buffoonery. It should, I think, be an instruction to future publishers of Charles Reade to give him Christian printing--to confine him in the body of his narrative to one fount of type, and rigorously to deny him the use (except in their accustomed and orthodox places) of capitals, small capitals, and italics. And I cannot think that any irreverence could be charged against an editor who had the courage to put a moist pen through those expressions of egotism and naive self-satisfaction and vanity which do occasionally disfigure his pages.