1815), and Mary Ann Evans (b.

1819).

It would be difficult to find three persons more different in temperament; impossible to find more striking instances of the way in which the new blend of romance and novel lent itself to the most various uses and developments.

Reade--who thought himself a dramatist and wasted upon drama a great deal of energy and an almost ideal position as a possessor of an unusually rich fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, with no duties--came rather closer to Dickens than to any novelist previously named, not merely in a sort of non-poetic but powerful imagination, but also in the mania for attacking what seemed to him abuses--in lunatic asylums (on which point he was very nearly a monomaniac himself), prisons, and many other things.

But he is almost more noteworthy, from our point of view, because of his use--it also must, one fears, be called an abuse--of a process obviously invited by the new demand for truth to life, and profitable up to a certain point.