in the _Cloister_ Reade challenges comparison with Scott on Scott's
own ground--the ground of sustained adventurous narrative--and the
advantage is not with Scott. Once more, take all the Waverley Novels
and search them through for two passages to beat the adventures of
Gerard and Denis the Burgundian (1) with the bear and (2) at "The Fair
Star" Inn, by the Burgundian Frontier. I do not think you will
succeed, even then. Indeed, I will go so far as to say that to match
these adventures of Gerard and Denis you must go again to Charles
Reade, to the homeward voyage of the _Agra_ in _Hard Cash_. For these
and for sundry other reasons which, for lack of space, cannot be
unfolded here, _The Cloister and the Hearth_ seems to me a finer
achievement than the finest novel of Scott's.

And now we come to the proposition that an author must be judged by
his best work. If this proposition be true, then I must hold Reade to
be a greater novelist than Scott. But do I hold this? Does anyone hold
this? Why, the contention would be an absurdity.

Reade wrote some twenty novels beside _The Cloister and the Hearth_,
and not one of the twenty approaches it. One only--_Griffith
Gaunt_--is fit to be named in the same day with it; and _Griffith
Gaunt_ is marred by an insincerity in the plot which vitiates, and is
at once felt to vitiate, the whole work. On everything he wrote before
and after _The Cloister_ Reade's essential vulgarity of mind is
written large. That he shook it off in that great instance is one of
the miracles of literary history. It may be that the sublimity of his
theme kept him throughout in a state of unnatural exaltation. If the
case cannot be explained thus, it cannot be explained at all. Other of
his writings display the same, or at any rate a like, capacity for
sustained narrative. _Hard Cash_ displays it; parts of _It is Never