While however this backbone of reality gives strength to Reade's novels, his devotion to fact sometimes leads him to forget unity and proportion. The violence of his convictions was apt to overbalance his judgment. He is at his best in his calmer and less didactic moods. For this reason _The Cloister and the Hearth_ (1861) is his masterpiece. In a historical novel, of which the scene is laid in the fifteenth century and the hero is the father of Erasmus, there is ample scope for Reade's love of investigation, and he has with great skill woven into the narrative the results of wide reading and patient study. The works of Erasmus are appropriately laid under contribution. But Reade has here no thesis to defend, no abuse to attack. The book is consequently better balanced than the novels of the class already mentioned; and the adventures are diversified with touches of pathos and with scenes of domestic life in the Dutch home, such as are hardly to be found elsewhere in Reade's works. The delineation of character also is subtler. In many of Reade's novels the characters are wholly subordinate to the purpose of the story. It is not Mr. Eden who interests us in _It is Never Too Late to Mend_, but rather his theories and methods. There is no rival among Reade's novels to _The Cloister and the Hearth_; but several of them nevertheless are of high quality. _Christie Johnstone_, a remarkably clever and successful study of the fisher population of the east of Scotland, is perhaps the freshest and least laboured of all his works; and _Griffith Gaunt_, an analysis of the workings of the passion of jealousy, is the subtlest as a psychological study; while _It is Never Too Late to Mend_ stands pretty near the head of its own class, the novel of purpose. Except the greatest of the writers already dealt with, and one other, Mr. George Meredith, who belongs rather to the next period, there was no contemporary writer who could do work equal to any one of them. * * * * *