SOURCE: "Charles Reade," in London Mercury, Vol. 4, June, 1921, pp. 150-63.

In the following excerpt, Hornung surveys Reade's novels.

Charles Reade was the youngest son of a country gentleman, one of the Reades of Ipsden, in Oxfordshire, where he was born twelve months before Waterloo. His schooling was private and ferocious; but at seventeen, thanks to an English Essay well above the average, he gained a Demyship at Magdalen, and four years later was elected a Fellow of the college. From that moment he considered himself condemned to perpetual celibacy, and observed the letter of an oppressive law inflexibly; yet the other celibates did not altogether approve of him.

In truth there never can have been a Don less donnish, or one less in sympathy with the accepted type. Did he not depict himself, in A Terrible Temptation, as "looking like a great fat country farmer" and "walking like...