No one can hesitate to declare this novel, as it is the latest, to be also the finest of all that Charles Reade has given us.  In saying this we do not forget the “Cloister and Hearth,” which, however tender and touching and true to its century, is rather a rambling narrative than an elucidated plot.  “Very Hard Cash” is wrought out with the finest finish, yet nowhere overdone; it so abounds in scenes of dramatic climax that we fancy the stage has lost immensely by the romance-reader’s gain; yet there is never a single situation thrown away, every word tends in the main direction, and after that the prolific mind of the writer overflows in marginalia.  There are one or two striking improbabilities, which Mr. Reade himself excuses by asserting that the commonplace is neither dramatic nor evangelical,—­and therefore we confess, that, so long as Reginald Bazalgette had a ship, Captain Dodd was as likely to turn up on that as on any other, the purser as likely to make his communication at that moment as later, and the fly as likely to resuscitate the patient as the surgeon.  But the characterization in this book is wonderful; every name becomes an acquaintance, from Mrs. Beresford, dividing Ajax’s emotion and declining to be drowned in the dark, with her servant Ramgolam and his matchless Orientalisms, up to the loftier models, one of whom he endows with this exquisite bit of description:—­

    “A head overflowed by ripples of dark-brown hair sat with heroic
    grace upon his solid white throat, like some glossy falcon
    new-lighted on a Parian column.”

We must, however, object to Fullalove, who is quite unworthy of the author, though perhaps complacently regarded by him as a success, being merely the traditional Yankee compound of patents and conjectures, a little smarter than usual, as of course a passage through Mr. Reade’s pen must make him;—­he never touched his brain.  Vespasian, also, is not so good as he might be, although one enjoys his contempt for the pirate’s crew of Papuans, Sooloos, and Portuguese, as a “mixellaneous bilin’ of darkies,” and finds something inimitable in his injured dignity over the anomalous sobriquet afforded him, whose changes he rings through analogy and anatomy till he declares himself to be only a “darned anemone.”  The real charm of the book, however, lies in the beautiful relation which it pictures between mother and children, and in the nature of the daughter herself, so exuberant, so dancing, yet the foam subsiding into such a luminous body of clearness, which so lights up the page with its loveliness, that, seeing how an artless woman is foreign to Mr. Reade’s ideas, we are forced to believe that Nature was too strong for him and he wrote against the grain.  Nevertheless, there is enough of his own prejudice retained for piquancy,—­and since the poor things must be insignificantly wicked, see how charming they can be!  There are many scenes between these covers that would well bear repetition, were they not too fresh in the reader’s mind to require it; we will content ourselves with a single one, which contains the only pretentious writing of the whole novel, done at a touch, with a light, loose pen, but showing beyond compare the soul of the poet through the flesh of the novelist.