I ask myself if these trifles--for in comparison with the sum of Reade’s genius they are small things indeed--can in any reasonable measure account for the neglect which undoubtedly besets him. In narrative vigour he has but one rival--Dumas _père_--and he is far and away the master of that rival in everything but energy. No male writer surpasses him in the knowledge of feminine human nature. There is no love-making in literature to beat the story of the courtship of Julia Dodd and Alfred Hardy in ‘Hard Cash.’ In mere descriptive power he ranks with the giants. Witness the mill on fire in ‘The Cloister and the Hearth’; the lark in exile in ‘Never too Late to Mend’; the boat-race in ‘Hard Cash’; the scene of Kate Peyton at the firelit window, and Griffith in the snow, in ‘Griffith Gaunt.’ There are a thousand bursts of laughter in his pages, not mere sniggers, but lung-shaking laughters, and the man who can go by any one of a hundred pathetic passages without tears is a man to be pitied. Let it be admitted that at times he wrenches his English rather fiercely, and yet let it be said that for delicacy, strength, sincerity, clarity, and all great graces of style, he is side by side with the noblest of our prose writers. Can it be that a few scattered drops of vulgarity in emphasis dim such a fire as this? Does so small a dead fly taint so big a pot of ointment? I will not be foolish enough to dogmatise on such a point, and yet I can find no other reasons than those I have already given why a master-craftsman should not hold a master-craftsman’s place. Solomon has told us what ‘a little folly’ can do for him who is in reputation for wisdom.’ The great mass of the public can always tell what pleases it, but it cannot always tell why it is pleased. And the man who writes for wide and lasting fame has to depend, not upon the verdict of the expert and the cultured, but on the love of those who only know they love, and who have no power to give the critical why and wherefore. The public--‘the stupid and ignorant pig of a public,’ as ‘Pococurante’ called it years ago--is always being abused, and yet it is only the public which, in the end, can tell us if we have done well or ill. We have all to consent to be measured by it, and, in the long run, it estimates our stature with a perfect accuracy.