to poor Mrs. Seymour's influence on observing that Reade's masterpiece The Cloister and the Hearth and Hard Cash (which many rank next) were written at a remove from her, in his college rooms. Anyhow she did not know enough of the times or the materials handled in The Cloister for her opinion to have had even a plausible value, and in fact he seems to have done without it. On the other hand, we do her memory the justice to doubt if any tact, any skill, could have taught Reade tact, cured his combativeness, or alleviated his wrathful knack of putting himself in the wrong. was not only hasty in a quarrel; being in it, he might be counted on to make his friends blush and the cool observer smile. The Memoir contains a letter, written before he commenced author, extending over many pages, addressed to the officials of the Treasury and haranguing them in this fashion because he had been charged what he thought an excessive import duty on some old violins:

He

Merit never comes to bear until first filtered through the consideration of name. If then a Man looks at twenty old fiddles, the merits of which he can see, but does not know who made each and how that Maker ranks in the Marketwhere is he? and what is he?- -a sailor on the wide Pacific without a compass or a star is not more the sport of water and wind than such a man as this is of flighty dreams and of brute chance. . . . Oh! my Lords, if you or the Commissioners would only condescend to look at the things. Malice is a blackguard, but Ignorance is a Wild Beast, &c., &c.

This kind of thing may not have been ineradicable in Reade, but it was certainly never eradicated. To the end-for example when accused of plagiarising from

Swift in The Wandering Heir-he could never fit the word with the occasion or keep any sense of proportion between the argument and his temper. A similar tactlessness led him, having accepted a commission from the firm of Cassell, Petter and Galpin, to affront the readers of Cassell's Magazine with A Terrible Temptation. Nobody could have been more genuinely amazed and indignant than was Reade at the reprobation it excited; but so recently as twenty years ago a mischievous person in search of amusement could count on it if he walked into Messrs. Cassell's premises and pronounced the name of Charles Reade in a voice above a whisper. Reade, to be sure, had usually moral right on his side, and behind his excesses; and the amount of positive good he did, not only towards reforming social abuses by such works as It is Never Too Late to Mend and Hard Cash, but by pamphlets and letters championing individual victims of injustice, would amount to a fine total. But we are considering him. as an artist, and the artistic side and the side of the angels are not conterminous, though they agree roughly.

The general verdict seems to be that, while Griffith Gaunt and Hard Cash are works of mastery (and the high seriousness of Griffith Gaunt cannot be denied), The Cloister and the Hearth was his masterpiece. With this verdict we entirely agree, and hold that, if there must be a first place among "historical" novels, that work and Esmond are the great challengers for it. For artistry, grace of handling, ease, finish, the delicate rhythm of its prose, nice perception of where to restrain passion, where and how far to let it go, Esmond must carry every vote. The Cloister and the IIearth, moreover, tails out tediously, though the end, when it comes, is

exquisite a thing of human blood purified to tears and tears to divine balm.

"But now the good fight is won, ah me! Oh my love, if thou hast lived doubting of thy Gerard's heart, die not so; for never was woman loved so tenderly as thou this ten years past.

"Calm tnyself, dear one," said the dying woman with a heavenly smile. "I know it; only being a woman, I could not die happy till I had heard thee say so.'

In the depth of this, as through the whole story which it closes, shines a something which Thackeray could no more match than he could match the epic chapters wherethrough Gerard adventures with Denys of Burgundy, though between the two novelists, on the sum of their writing, there can be, of course, no comparison.

None the less, and through all his blindfold mistakes -even through his most amazing trivialities-Reade carries always the indefinable aura of greatness. Often vulgar, and not seldom ludicrous, he is never petty. "No man," said Johnson, "was ever written down but by himself." Reade, vain and apt to write himself down in the act of writing himself up, was all but consistently the worse foe of his own reputation. It will probably survive all the worst he did, because he was great in a way, and entirely sincere.

PATRIOTISM IN ENGLISH

BY

LITERATURE. I.

I

Y those who do not understand Socratic irony, or the delicacies of it as rendered by Plato, a great deal of obtuse criticism has been wasted upon the Menexenus, which is a dialogue purporting to be a true account by Socrates of a funeral oration composed to be recited over certain of the Athenian dead who fell in the Peloponnesian war. Let me sketch the introduction:

Socrates happens on his friend Menexenus, returning from the Agora. "Where have you been, Menexenus?" "At the Council, where they were to choose some one to pronounce the customary oration over the dead; for there is to be a public funeral. But the meeting adjourned without deciding on the orator." "O Menexenus, death in battle is a fine thing. The poor fellow, however poor he was, gets a costly funeral and an elaborate speech by a wise man who has prepared it long beforehand. He is praised for what he has done and for what he has not done that is the beauty of it. And the speaker so steals away our souls, Menexenus, that Istanding and listening-feel myself a finer fellow than ever I have been; and, if there be any foreigners present, I am made conscious of a certain superiority over them,

and they seem to experience a corresponding awe of me, and in fact it takes me about three days to get over it. "You are always poking fun at us, Socrates. But what will the poor fellow-I mean the orator-have to say, at so short a notice?" "Oh, that's easy. If a speaker had to praise Athenians among Peloponnesians, or Peloponnesians among Athenians, he might have some ado to gain credit. But where's his difficulty to win applause among the very people whom he is praising?" "Could you do it, Socrates?"-"Well, yes, I have hopes I could praise Athenians to Athenians; and the more because I can recollect almost word for word a funeral oration I heard Aspasia compose, only last night, on these very dead, putting together fragments of a famous funeral oration which Pericles spoke, but (as I believe) she composed for him."

Then follows the oration, carefully absurd in its dates, obviously travestied from Pericles' famous speech as conjectured for him by Thucydides. And the German scholars solemnly doubt (although Aristotle happens to quote the dialogue as Plato's) how the thing can be Plato's, seeing it is so very like Thucydides: and why Plato a serious philosopher should put it into the mouth of Aspasia, of all people! They incline to think it spurious, on internal evidence: which means, the evidence of their internals.

We must not suppose, however, because Plato, speaking through the mouth of Socrates, lets his irony play like summer lightning around these patriotic encomia upon the dead, that therefore he was no true patriot, or anything less than a fervent one. For, first, observe that what he so gently derides is ready-made patriotism kept in stock and vended to order-the sort of thing that in a later age constrained Dr. Johnson to utter