I knew Charles Reade in England far back in “the days that are no more,” and dined with him at the Garrick Club on the evening before I left London for New York in 1860, when he gave me parting words of good advice and asked me to write to him often.  Then he added, “I am very sorry you are going away, my dear boy; but perhaps you are doing a good thing for yourself in getting out of this God-forsaken country.  If I were twenty years younger, and enjoyed the sea as you do, I might go with you; but, if travel puts vitality into some men and kills others, I should be one of the killed.  What is one man’s food is another’s poison.”

He was my senior by more than twenty years, and no man that I have known well was more calculated to inspire love and respect among his friends.  To know him personally, after only knowing him through his writings and his tilts with those with whom he had “a crow to pick,” was a revelation.  He had the reputation of being always “spoiling for a fight,” and the most touchy, crusty, and aggressive author of his time, surpassing in this respect even Walter Savage Landor.  But, though his trenchant pen was sometimes made to do almost savage work, it was generally in the chivalric exposure of some abuse or in the effort to redress some grievous wrong.  Then indeed he was fired with righteous indignation.  The cause had to be a just one, however, before he did battle in its behalf, for no bold champion of the right ever had more sterling honesty and sincerity in his character, or more common sense and less quixotism.

His placid and genial manner and amiable characteristics in his every-day home-life presented a striking contrast to his irritability and indignation under a sense of injury; for whenever he considered himself wronged or insulted his wrath boiled up with the suddenness of a squall at sea.  He resented a slight, real or imaginary, with unusual outspokenness and vigor, and said, “I never forgive an injury or an insult.”  But in this he may have done himself injustice.  Generally, he was one of the most sympathetic and even lovable of men, and his pure and resolute manhood appeared in its truest light to those who knew him best.

While genial in disposition, he could not be called either mirthful or jovial, and so could neither easily turn any unpleasant incident off with a joke or be turned off by one.  He needed a little more of the easy-going good humor and freedom from anxiety that fat men are popularly supposed to possess to break the force of collisions with the world.  Had he been more of an actor and less of a student in the drama of life, he would have been less sensitive.