This is the last, and in many respects the best, of Mr. Charles Reade’s literary achievements.  Its popularity, we are informed, exceeds that of any of his former works, excepting the first two published by him, “Peg Woffington,” and “Christie Johnstone,” which a few years ago startled the novel-reading world by their eccentricity of style, their ingenious novelty of construction, and also by their freshness of sentiment,—­comet-books, pursuing one another in erratic orbits of thought, now close upon the central light of Truth, now distantly remote from it, but always brilliant, and generally leaving a sparkling train of recollection behind.  The author’s subsequent productions, until the present, have been less successful; some by reason of their positive inferiority; some because of their extraordinary affectations of expression, repelling the multitude, who do not choose to risk their brains through unlimited pages of labyrinthine rhetoric; some, perhaps, because of their doubtful paternity, evidences of French origin being in many places discernible.  Here, however, there appears a manifest improvement.  This story is exquisitely simple in conception, and the narration is mostly full of ease and grace, although the unfolding of the plot is less direct than might have been expected from an author who professes so deep a regard for the dramatic order of development.  There is, for instance, an episodical chapter of upwards of thirty pages, describing commercial England in a state of panic, which is very nearly as appropriate as a disquisition on the Primary Rocks, or an inquiry into the origin of the Cabala would be, but which is so palpably introduced for the purpose of displaying the author’s financial erudition, that he feels himself called upon to apologize in a brief preface for its intrusion.  In the concluding chapters, too, the various threads of interest are gathered together with very little artistic compactness.  The reader is disappointed at the tameness of the culmination, compared with the vigor of the approach thereto.  But otherwise there is much to be charmed with, and not a little to admire.

Mr. Reade has renounced a good number of the odd fancies which at one time pervaded him.  We find no traces of the [Greek:  stigmatophobia] with which he was formerly afflicted.  Nouns are wedded to obedient adjectives, adverbs to their willing verbs, by the lawful mediation of the recognized authorities of punctuation, the illegitimate and licentious disregard of which, as recklessly manifested in “It is Never too Late to Mend,” indicated a disposition to entirely subvert the established morals of the language.  It is pleasant to see how unreservedly Mr. Reade has abandoned his functions as apostle of grammatical free-love.  Of tricks of typography there are also fewer, although these yet remain in an excess which good taste can hardly sanction.  We often find whole platoons of admiration-points stretching out in line, to give extraordinary emphasis to sentences already sufficiently forcible.  We sometimes encounter extravagant varieties of type, humorously intended, but the use of which seems a game hardly worth Mr. Reade’s candle, which certainly possesses enough illuminating power of its own, without seeking additional refulgence by such commonplace expedients.