" Such a retort, so delivered, could
not but placate even an outraged author.
Of Charles Reade my father saw little, and was not impressed by what
he saw; but Reade, writing of him to my sister Una, five-and-twenty
years after, said, "Your father had the most magnificent eye that I
ever saw in a human head." Reade was just past forty at the time he
met my father, and had just published _It Is Never Too Late to
Mend_--the first of his great series of reform novels. Christie
Johnstone and Peg Woffington were very clever, and written with
immense vigor and keenness, but did not give the measure of the man. I
doubt if my father had as yet read any of them; but later he was very
fond of Reade's writings. Certainly he could not but have been moved
by The Cloister and the Hearth, the greatest and most beautiful of all
historical novels. He saw in him only a tall, athletic, light-haired
man with blue eyes. I was more fortunate. I not only came to know
Reade in 1879, but also knew several persons who knew him intimately
and loved and admired him prodigiously; they were all in one story
about him. He was then still tall and athletic, but his wavy hair and
beard were gray; his face was one of the most sensitive men's faces I
ever saw, and his forehead was straight and fine, full of observation
and humor; his eyes were by turns tender and sparkling. There was a
great deal of the feminine in Reade, together with his robust and
aggressive masculinity.
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