arises here from innate capacity.  Unconsciously, as we have said, is it that our author is self-betrayed, for he is by nature so peculiarly a raconteur that he forgets himself entirely in seizing the prominent points of his story; and it is to this that his chief fault is attributable,—­the want of elaboration,—­a fault, however, which he has greatly overcome in his later books, where, leaving sketchy outlines, he has given us one or two complete and perfect pictures.  His style, too, owes some slight debt to this fact; it has been saved thereby from offensive mannerism, and yet given traits of its own insusceptible of imitation,—­for by mannerism we mean affectations of language, not absurdities of type.

There is a racy verve and vigor in Charles Reade’s style, which, after the current inanities, is as inspiriting as a fine breeze on the upland; it tingles with vitality; he seems to bring to his work a superb physical strength, which he employs impartially in the statement of a trifle or the storming of a city; and if on this page he handles a ship in a sea-fight with the skill and force of a Viking, on the other he picks up a pin cleaner of the adjacent dust than weaker fingers would do it.  There is no trace of the stale, flat, and unprofitable here; the books are fairly alive, and that gesture tells their author best with which a great actress once portrayed to us the poet Browning, rolling her hands rapidly over one another, while she threw them up in the air, as if she would describe a bubbling, boiling fountain.

Charles Reade is the prose for Browning.  The temperament of the two in their works is almost identical, having first allowed for the delicate femineity proper to every poet; and the richness that Browning lavishes till it strikes the world no more than the lavish gold of the sun, the lavish blue of the sky, Reade, taking warning, hoards, and lets out only by glimpses.  Yet such glimpses! for beauty and brilliancy and strength, when they do occur, unrivalled.  Yet never does he desert his narrative for them one moment; on the contrary, we might complain that he almost ignores the effect of Nature on various moods and minds:  in a volume of six hundred pages, the sole bit of so-called fine writing is the following, justified by the prominence of its subject in the incidents, and showing in spite of itself a certain masculine contempt for the finicalities of language:—­

“The leaves were many shades deeper and richer than any other tree could show for a hundred miles round,—­a deep green, fiery, yet soft; and then their multitude,—­the staircases of foliage, as you looked up the tree, and could scarce catch a glimpse of the sky,—­an inverted abyss of color, a mound, a dome, of flake-emeralds that quivered in the golden air.

“And now the sun sets,—­the green leaves are black,—­the moon rises,—­her cold light shoots across one-half that giant stem.

“How solemn and calm stands the great round tower of living wood, half ebony, half silver, with its mighty cloud above of flake-jet leaves tinged with frosty fire at one edge!”