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