and if, instead of suing for peace she had determined to sit down and wait, America would have found herself in a very ugly position indeed. The idea of sending Watson to Spain may be disregarded, for the bombardments of San Juan, Matanzas, and elsewhere were completely ineffective, as we now know from independent sources. Morro Castle was repeatedly razed, and the other fortifications were repeatedly demolished; yet, even after these events, and after the destruction of Cervera's fleet, Sampson admitted to his Government that he could not enter the harbor until Shafter had first car-, ried these same fortifications. Although it is conceivable that the bombardment of Cadiz and Barcelona might have been less ineffective, the risks attending the venture would have been vastly greater; the fortifications are indisputably stronger, and the responsibility which an admiral would have incurred by subjecting his ships to the danger of material injury, so far from any base, would not have been lost sight of at Washington.

By giving way when they did, the Spanish Government shed a lustre upon the American arms which it would have taken them a very long time to acquire for themselves. For Santiago was the only place to which the United States troops addressed themselves, and there can be no doubt whatever that the story of the siege of Santiago would have been the story of the siege of every other fortified town in Cuba. Moreover, by giving way when she did, Spain has imposed on America the part of a Frankenstein, who has created a monster that will not be too

easily disposed of. Without suggesting that every statement in American newspapers should be taken quite literally, we are yet of opinion that none of

them should be entirely disregarded, and it will require all McKinley's undoubted ability and strength of character, to keep in check the dangerous spirit engendered by the jingoism of certain journals. Since the protocol has been signed, it is said that war is not nearly so dreadful as was believed, that the American army has shown itself invincible, and that in future it will be quite unnecessary to take into consideration the strength of any adversary, since a mere alteration in a stroke of the President's pen would raise ten million men as easily as it raised half-a-million. The same papers argue that with the birth of the AngloAmerican understanding, the last obstacle which prevented Canada from entering the Union has been removed, and that, Cuba being now freed from Spanish rule, America must not desist until all the West Indian Islands are American as well. As we listen to them we are inclined to say with Job, "no doubt ye are the men, and wisdomi will die with you," but even as we say it we have a consciousness, that with the expulsion of the Spanish army of occupation, America's work in Cuba has only begun, and that before she has completed it, she will modify her definition of humanitarianism.

The Government at Madrid has ended the war as it began it. The Spanish army in Cuba is coming home without having been blooded. Will it or will it not see how it has been bamboozled, insulted, and humiliated by the miserable political adventurers who have betrayed even the Lady and the Child whom they profess to serve? Upon its decision the destiny of Spain. rests, and as we have already said, Carlists have no reason to fear what that decision will be; for brave men are not necessarily fools.-Fortnightly Review.

IN the year of grace 1851 there was in London a hard-working young man of thirty-seven who ardently desired above all things to be a playwright. He was no mere Grub Street hack, but a man of good family and sound education. He came of an old Oxfordshire stock he had had a distinguished career at the premier University of England, and was a fellow of one of its colleges he had travelled on the Continent and seen a considerable share of the world. Yet here he was in London, with a brain full of grand ideas, and a drawer full of plays that no theatrical manager would accept on any terms, eating his heart out with vexation and ready to give up the struggle.

In his despair he wrote to an actress whom he had often seen and admired on the boards of the Haymarket theatre-wrote her a piteous note, telling her, no doubt, all about his ambitions and the merits of his plays, and asking for leave to read one of them to her. Mrs. Seymour was only an actress, but she had a kind heart, and she asked this unknown Shakespeare to come and see her. Next day he went to her house, armed with an original drama of his own composition, in which the loves and despairs of a noble lord and a noble lady, a struggling artist and a Newhaven fishwife were pulled into a beautiful tangle in the first three or four acts and deftly unravelled in the last. The young man declaimed his beautiful dialogue to the actress and her friends, and waited for her to fall on his neck in astonishment and delight; but Mrs. Seymour did not seem to be a bit impressed, and the poor author slunk away, heartbroken. The following morning, however, he got a note from her telling him that the play had merit, but advising him to turn it into a story. The letter concluded with a woman's postscript. She told him how sorry she was to see a gentleman of his obvious birth and breeding

so low in the world, and she begged to enclose a five-pound note-as a loan. This, to a Reade of Ipsden, and a fellow of Magdalen College, was a surprise, and the acquaintanceship thus begun ripened into a friendship that was of immense practical use to Reade in after years, and only ended with the death of Laura Seymour twenty-eight years later.

Charles Reade was a born storyteller. No English writer has ever been able to spin a yarn, pure and simple, with the directness and force, the terseness and dramatic vividness of this writer. In every one of his eighteen books he tells a story of fascinating interest, which grips the attention of the reader from the first line and holds it as in a vice until the last enthralling word is read. The man or woman who can read "The Cloister and the Hearth," or "Hard Cash," or "Griffith Gaunt," without having his knowledge of other men and other times vastly extended, his views of life. broadened, and his sympathies and feelings stirred to the very quick, has a very thick head and a very cold heart.

But as it was the ambition of Scott and George Eliot to be great poets rather than great novelists, it was Reade's life-long struggle to gain success as a dramatist. It is said that he would willingly have given up all his fame as a novelist to have had one unqualified triumph on the stage-a triumph that never came. The comedy of "Masks and Faces" certainly did take London by storm in 1852, but Reade was not the sole author and could not claim all the credit. However, the best part of that play must be attributed to him. He conceived and elaborated most of the characters: Peg Woffington, the beautiful Irish woman who could turn the men folk round her little finger, but was melted by the sight of her rival's tears; Triplet, the writer of unacted tragedies, the man who lived

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in imagination in king's palaces and who could not fill the mouths of his starving progeny with bread; Mabel Vane, the sweet unsophisticated country girl who came to London town after a weak and erring husband. It was Reade who invented the story and most of the incidents; but Tom Taylor, his collaborateur, threw the whole into dramatic shape and gave the play its most sparkling passages of dialogue. A year later Reade turned his part of the work into a story, calling it" Peg Woffington." This is his first and one. of his finest books. It is a model of artistic construction, containing neither a word too much nor a word too little. It tells a charmingly fresh and original story, the reading of which is like setting one's teeth in a juicy pear fresh from the warm sunshine.

It is related that in his early days Reade said: "I am like Goldsmith and others-I shall blossom late," and, true enough, he was almost forty years of age before his life-work began. He deliberately sets out in his diary at this time the plan that he intended to follow in the writing of fiction. He proposed never to guess where he could know; to visit all the places and experience all the sensations he intended to describe; to understand all that was possible of the hearts and brains of the people he intended to portray-in a word, to be a writer of truths instead of a writer of lies. "Now I know exactly what I am worth," he says. "If I can work the above great system, there is enough of me to make one of the writers of the day. Without itno, no."

His first long novel, "It is never too Late to Mend," gives a lurid picture of prison life in England in the early years of the century, and brought about some important changes in the law with regard to the detention of prisoners. The atrocities practised on Tom Robinson by the brutal governor and his warders are written, as Reade himself said of another book,

in many places with art, in all with red ink and the biceps muscle." While he was writing this book he took the utmost pains to verify every fact and incident that is described. He visited many prisons, he put himself in the

NEW SERIES.-VOL. LXVIII., No. 5.

convict's place, he did his turn on the treadmill, he turned the crank, he even submitted to incarceration in the dark cell, and suffered while there unspeakable torture. He supplemented the information gained thus by reading libraries of blue books, pamphlets, letters, and volumes dealing with prisons and prison life. In "Hard Cash" he exposed, with the same ruthless pen and the same strength of invective, the villanies and dark deeds practised on the unfortunate inmates of private lunatic asylums; and in "Put Yourself in His Place" he dealt in the same trenchant style with outrages committed by illegal trade unions. These three stories, if they are not distinguished by any subtle exposition of character nor by any abstruse psychological analysis of motive and conduct, simply reek with human nature and pulsate with life and movement from beginning to end. In the writing of them, Reade may have totally disregarded the canons of art (so called), but he did not mind any such puny limitation on his genius when he had a story to tell. In every one of his books the reader is sucked into the wild current of the narrative on the very first page, and carried with feverish haste from one scene of excitement, daring, terror, or pity to another, until he suddenly finds himself stranded on the last unwelcome word "finis."

After the publication of "It is never too Late to Mend," Reade's next important work was a story called "Love me Little, Love me Long," a "mild tale," in which our author discusses no social problems and indulges in no red ink. It is entirely a love story, relating the efforts of a big, simple-minded, fiddle-playing sailor to capture the somewhat elusive affections of Miss Lucy Fountain, a young lady with a complex mind, whose anxiety to displease nobody carried her too often into the neutral zone between truth and falsehood, and sometimes even beyond that territory on the wrong side.

But all these efforts were but the skirmishes before the real engagement. Reade had done good work, but nothing yet that entitled him to immortality. About this time an old Latin legend came under his notice which

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told with harsh brevity the strange history of a pair who lived untrumpeted and died unsung four hundred years ago." It was a touching story, with artistic and dramatic possibilities, and Reade determined to breathe into it the spirit of humanity. Accordingly, our author was to be seen, toward the end of the year 1859, in the Bodleian and Magdalen College libraries grubbing among the writings and chronicles of Froissart, Erasmus, Gringoire, Luther, and their fellows, and endeavoring to get an insight as to the state of society in Holland, Germany, and Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The pains that he took with this book, called first "A Good Fight" and afterward "The Cloister and the Hearth," were almost superhuman. His letters at this time are full of it. "I am under weigh again," he writes, "but rather slowly. I think this story will almost wear my mind out." Again, “I can't tell whether it will succeed or not as a whole, but there shall be great and tremendous and tender things in it." It is interesting to trace through these letters the gradual evolution of characters and scenes that have charmed millions of people since. In one of them he says: ard is just now getting to France after many adventures in Germany. The new character I have added-Denys, a Burgundian soldier, a crossbowmanwill, I hope and trust, please you." Never was hope better founded. Since those words were written, many and many a reader has lived over again the sayings and doings of this honest, truehearted adventurer, with his everlasting"Courage, le diable est mort." Denys's "foible," as we are told, was woman. "When he met a peasant girl on the road he took off his cap to her as if she was a queen, the invariable effect of which was that she suddenly drew herself up quite stiff like a soldier on parade, and wore a forbidding aspect.'

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They drive me to despair,' sighed poor Denys. Is that a just return for a civil bonnetade? They are large, they are fair, but stupid as swans. A little affability adorns even beauty." When "The Cloister and the Hearth" was published in 1861, it was accepted

by the critics and the public as a great work, but it created no burst of enthusiasm. However, that year was prolific in great works. A public that was reading "Silas Marner," "Great Expectations, The Adventures of Philip,' "The Woman in White," "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," and a new book by Anthony Trollope, had its powers of appreciation fully engaged, and had little attention to devote to a comparatively new author like Reade. Time, however, has stamped "The Cloister and the Hearth" with the seal of immortality. The pitiful story of Gerard and Margaret," the sweetest, saddest, and most tender love story ever devised by wit of man," can never die. Here is how Reade tells the end of it all:

"Thus after life's fitful fever these true lovers were at peace. The grave, kinder to them than the Church, united them forever; and now a man of another age and nation, touched with their fate, has labored to build their tombstone, and rescue them from long and unmerited oblivion. ... In every age the Master of life and death, who is kinder as well as wiser than we

are, has transplanted to heaven, young, earth's sweetest flowers. I ask your sympathy, then, for their rare constancy and pure affection, and their cruel separation by a vile heresy in the bosom of the Church; but not your pity for their early but happy end. *. Beati sunt qui in Domino moriuntur.''

It is difficult to see how any one can approach this book in a critical spirit, although one writer has had the temerity to say certain disparaging things about it. It is entitled to nothing but the profoundest admiration, and its author to the most unbounded gratitude. Sir Walter Besant calls it the greatest historical novel in the lan guage, and very few will be found to deny the justice of such praise. In Reade's next book, "Hard Cash," which was written for Dickens's magazine, the author gives a vivid picture of himself at work, calling himself Mr. Rolfe, "the writer of romances founded on facts." He describes his library as one of note-books and indexes-great volumes, containing a classified collection of facts, ideas, pictures, incidents,

characters, scraps of dialogues, and letters. They were arranged and indexed under a multitude of headings, such as curialia, or man as revealed in the law courts; femina vera, or the real woman; humores diei, or the humor of the day; nigri loci, or reports of dark deeds perpetrated in prison and lunatic asylums; "the dirty oligarchy," which included reports of trade outrages and strikes. Such an insatiable thirst had he for facts of the very smallest importance that he even collected and classified the exclamations and colloquial expressions commonly used by women in real life. When he was writing a novel, he arranged in parallel columns, on thick pasteboard cards, each about the size of a large portfolio, all the facts, incidents, living dialogues, reflections, and situations that he intended to use in the book. On this pile of dry bones he breathed the breath of genius, and immediately there sprang into life and being those great books that have been the delight and comfort of many a wearied brain.

Reade reached the height of his fame and powers with "Griffith Gaunt," published in 1866. Although full of incident and action, this book is the nearest approach to a mere character study that Reade ever attempted. Kate Gaunt and Mercy Vint, examples of two very different types of noble womanhood, and Griffith Gaunt, the poor, weak, jealous hero, vacillating between the two of them, are as carefully and truthfully drawn as any characters in fiction. Altogether, as regards characters, incidents, and construction, the book is a triumph, full of noble passages and distinguished by the keenest pathos.

It has never been denied that Reade was a writer who, when he chose, could play on the terror and pity of his readers; but Sir Walter Besant has said that, although always cheerful and hopeful, he is wanting in fun and mirth. Certainly he has written nothing that will provoke noisy hilarity or unctuous chuckling; but, as it has been said, if the keenest humor is only a delightful sense of something perfect in allusion or suggestion, Reade's work does contain much that is humorous. Witness the sly passage in "The Double Marriage":

"She does not love him quite enough. Cure -marriage.

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He loves her a little too much. Curemarriage."

Reade's use of the English language, too, was eccentric, not to say ludicrous. In "A Simpleton," when he wished to signify that two people turned their backs on each other in a fit of temper, he wrote, "They showed napes." Describing the complexion of the Newhaven fishwives in "Christie Johnstone," he says:-" It is a race of women that the northern sun peachifies instead of rosewoodizing." In Readiana" he describes a gentleman giving a lunch to two ladies at a railway restaurant as follows:-" He souped them, he tough-chickened them, he brandied and cochinealed one, and he brandied and burnt-sugared the other." (Brandy and cochineal, and brandy and burnt sugar, being Reade's euphemisms for port and sherry respectively.) While he was preparing his series of articles on Old Testament characters, he read what he had written to John Coleman on one occasion and came to this startling passage in his argument:

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Having now arrived at this conclusion, we must go the whole hog or none.'

Coleman objected to this phrase.

"You don't like the hog, I see," said Reade. "Well, it's a strong figure of speech, and it's understanded of the people; but yes, you are right; it's scarcely Scriptural-so out it goes.

Unlike Eliot and Meredith, Reade develops the individuality of his people, and shows their various thoughts, motives, feelings, and passions, by means of dialogue and action rather than through deliberate analysis. He himself said of George Eliot that her business seemed to him to consist principally in describing with marvellous accuracy the habits, manners, and customs of animalcula as they exist under the microscope. Reade indulges in no introspection; he makes no pretence of being a psychologist; he assumes to be only a recorder of events and nothing more. When Griffith Gaunt left his wife in the wood, full of rage at her supposed faithlessness, and determined to look on her beautiful face no more forever, the