“Well,” he replied, “these are the tools of my trade, and the time and labor I spend on them are well invested.”  Then he went on to say of literary composition, “Genius without labor, we all know, will not keep the pot boiling.  But I doubt whether one may not put too much labor into his work as well as too little, and spend too much time in polishing.  Rough vigor often hits the nail better than the most studied and polished sentences.  It doesn’t do to write above the heads or the tastes of the people.  I make it a rule to put a little good and a little bad into every page I write, and in that way I am likely to suit the taste of the average reader.  The average reader is no fool, neither is he an embodiment of all the knowledge, wit, and wisdom in the world.”

He valued success as a dramatic author more highly than as a novelist, and was always yearning for some great triumph on the stage.  In this respect he was like Bulwer Lytton, who once said to me, “I think more of my poems and ‘The Lady of Lyons’ and ‘Richelieu’ than of all my novels, from ‘Pelham’ to ‘What will he do with it?’” (which was the last he had then written).  “A poet’s fame is lasting, a novelist’s is comparatively ephemeral.”  Moved by a similar sentiment, Reade once said, “The most famous name in English literature and all literature is a dramatist’s; and what pygmies Fielding and Smollett, and all the modern novelists, from Dickens, the head and front of them, down to that milk-and-water specimen of mediocrity, Anthony Trollope, seem beside him!"[1]

He had little taste for poetry, because of his strong preference for prose as a vehicle of thought and expression.  He, however, greatly admired Byron, Shelley, and Scott, and paid a passing compliment to Swinburne, except as to the too fiery amatory ardor of his first poems; but he considered Tennyson, with all his polish, little better than a versifier, and said his plays of “Dora” and “The Cup” would have been “nice enough as spectacles without words.”  For those great masters of prose fiction and dramatic art, Victor Hugo and Dumas pere, he had unbounded admiration, and of the former in particular he always spoke with enthusiasm as the literary giant of his age, and to him, notwithstanding his extravagances, assigned the first place among literary Frenchmen.  Dumas he ranked second, except as a dramatist; and here he believed him to be without a superior among his contemporaries.

For several years after I came to New York Charles Reade and I kept up a close friendly correspondence, and he sent me proof-sheets of “The Cloister and the Hearth” in advance of its publication in England, so that the American reprint of the work might appear simultaneously therewith, which it did through my arrangements with Rudd & Carleton.  He also sent me two of his own plays,—­“Nobs and Snobs” and “It is Never Too Late to Mend,” drawn from his novel of that name,—­in the hope that the managers of some of the American theatres would produce them; but, notwithstanding their author’s fame, their own superior merit, and my personal efforts, the expectation was disappointed, owing, as Mr. Reade said, to their preferring to steal rather than to buy plays,—­a charge only too well sustained by the facts.  Another play, written by a friend of his, that he sent me, met with a like reception.