On the 29th of June, 1863, he wrote, “I am much pleased with your ‘Knickerbocker Magazine,’ and cannot too much admire your energy and versatility.  Take notice, I recommended you Miss Braddon’s works while they were to be had for a song.  ‘Lost and Saved,’ by Mrs. Norton, will make you a good deal of money if you venture boldly on it and publish it.  It is out-and-out the best new thing, and rather American.  If you hear of any scrap-books containing copious extracts from American papers, I am open to purchase at a fair price, especially if the extracts are miscellaneous and dated, and, above all, if classified.  I shall, also be grateful if you will tell me whether there is not a journal that reports trials, and send me a specimen.  Command me whenever you think I can be of an atom of use to you.”

Charles Reade’s letters were always highly characteristic of him.  In these he mentally photographed himself, for he always wrote with candid unreserve, whether to friend or foe, and he liked to talk with the pen.  Both by nature and education he was fitted for a quiet, studious, scholarly life, and with pen and paper and books he was always at home.  He liked, too, at intervals the cloister-like life he led at Magdalen College.  With nothing to disturb him in his studies and his work, with glimpses of bright green turf and umbrageous recesses and gray old buildings with oriel windows that were there before England saw the Wars of the Roses, his environment was picturesque, and his bursar’s cap and gown became him well, yet seemed to remove him still further from the busy world and suggest some ecclesiastical figure of the fifteenth century.  He was a D.C.L., and known as Dr. Reade in the college, just as if he had never written a novel or a play and had been untrumpeted by fame.

There, in his rooms on “Staircase No. 2,” with “Dr. Reade” over the door, he labored con amore.  Indeed, he was amid more congenial surroundings and more truly in his element in the atmosphere of the ancient university than in London or anywhere else.  By both nature and habit he was more fitted to enjoy the cloister than the hearth, although he by no means undervalued the pleasures of society and domestic life.  The children of his brain—­his own works—­seemed to be the only ones he cared for; and, loving and feeling proud of his literary family, he was mentally satisfied.  Yet no man was a keener observer of home-life, and his portraiture of women and analysis of female character, although unvarying as to types, were singularly true and penetrating.  His Fellowship was the principal cause of his never marrying, the next most important one being that he was always wedded to his pen; and literature, like law, is a jealous mistress.  He had some idea of this kind when he said, “An author married is an author marred,”—­an adaptation from Shakespeare, who was ungallant enough to say, “A young man married is a man that’s marred.”  But a good and suitable wife would have given eclat to his social life.