READE'S NEVER. TOO LATE TO BEND. * MR. CEAvr. - Es READE has

chosen for the title and moral of his novel a principle of all but universal applicability, and likely•to be especially popular at the present time in his particular mode of applying it. The minds of thoughtful Englishmen have been much turned of late to schemes for reforming the criminal classes

• 0f our population, to systems of prison discipline, and to institu- tions for combining the education of the criminal with the punish- ment of his crime. It might once have been a question whether a subject of such stern practical importance, involving so much that is saddening and even revolting to the heart and to the taste, and demanding for its treatment any qualities rather than one- sided sentimentality, is well adapted to give that pleasure which readers look for at the hands of the novelist. But, to say nothing of many other novels which have won the attention of the public

• "It is Never too Late to Mend" : a Matter-of-fact Romance. By Charles Reade, Author of " Christie Johnstone," " Bey Woffinyton," 4-c. In three volumes. Published by Bentley.

to serious social' questions that would otherwise have excited the reforming zeal of only a small class of politicians or professed

philanthropists, the success of Uncle Tom settles that doubt for

ever, and establishes that nothing but genius and true earnest- ness on the part of a writer are required to move the heart of mankind to fervid sympathy with the real, vulgar, everyday suf- ferings of their brethren, far more strongly and iruly than with the sentimental woes and drawingroom distresses which form the staple of so much of our circulating library fiction. It is indeed beginning to be felt that the highest function of art is to reveal to the heart and senses of ordinary men the true meaning—the tragedy and comedy—of that which is daily before their eyes,

though they see it not, or seeing it understand it not. And if this truth ever reach its practical consummation, art will indeed ber come the handmaid of religion and morality, presenting life as it

should be in contrast with life as it is ; aiding us to realize in its full force of impressiveness the battle that is always going on around us and within us between good and evil ; revealing a us

hidden sources of strength and weakness, a beauty and a joy in- exhaustible and ever increasing, beside a hideousness and a misery

equally beyond computation or limit ; and especially counteract- ing the hard generalizing tendencies of science, as well as the selfish egotism of practical pursuits minutely subdivided and fol- lowed for individual gain. The real hero of Mr. Reade's novel is a London thief, who early in the book gets sent to a gaol managed on the solitary system by a brutal governor and stupid justices • the model being trans-

parently the Birmingham Gaol, under justices; Governor Austin who was a year or two since tried for manslaughter, and proved to

have caused directly and indirectly the death of several of the pri- soners under his charge. About a volume is occupied with the de- tails of this prison, the maddening effects of solitary confinement without any alleviation, and varied only by the black-hole, the

punishment-jacket, starvation, deprivation of light and warmth, and the terrible labour of the crank. Nothing in Uncle Torn is

more harrowing than these prison scenes through which Robinson

the London thief is made to pass, and nothing in Uncle Tom con- veys a more irresistible impression of truth to nature than the

sickening of despair gradually hardening into the most dogged sullen phrensy of defiance produced upon the originally genial and amiable temper of the prisoner by the brutalities to which he is subjected. The painful interest of these scenes is relieved by the presence of the gaol chaplain, who succeeds to his office shortly after Robinson's committal to prison, and who instantly sets him- self to the task of correcting the enormities perpetrated under pre- tence of prison discipline, first by remonstrance with the governor, and that failing by appealing to the Home Secretary, who send; down a commissioner to investigate the charges of the chaplain. The chaplain is finally victorious, and the prison is reformed. Robinson meanwhile is sent as a convict to Australia, with his feelings strongly impressed by the humanity of the chaplain, and with apparently firm determinations to reform his ways. On his arrival, however, owing to the bad arrangements by which. con- victs are left without effectual discipline after they partially ac-, quire their liberty, the poor fellow falls again into bad company, and is tempted to take part in a burglary, in which he so narrowly escapes detection as to be thoroughly frightened, and resolves to fly to an honest farmer to whom he has brought a letter of introduc-

tion. To this farmer, with whom he had been acquainted in Eng- land, he becomes warmly attached, and is enabled to do great ser- vices. The two friends together are made to discover the gold in Australia ; and finally they make a fortune, and return to Eng

land, the farmer to marry a girl for whose sake he had originally emigrated, and Robinson to see his friend safely married ; after which, he goes back to Australia, marries, and lives prosperously and honestly. We may remark 'by the way, that the life in Aus- tralia, first on a sheep-farm, and afterwards at the diggings, is dramatized with the same force and truth as the prison life in England ; and that the subordinate personages are sketched with marked individuality, and may very well pass for types of the different sorts of people to be met with where they are introduced. If Mr. Reade had been contented with the materials for a story which we have enumerated, and had trusted, as he well might, to

his powers of character-drawing and strikino.b narrative, he would

have been wise. We never met with a book which more forcibly illustrated the old maxim that half is better than the whole.

For, with all this material of which we have been speaking, and which Mr. Reade has made intensely interesting by his perception of character, and his power of presenting it as influenced by and developing itself in speech and incident, he has interwoven a melodramatic plot, which ought to have been—if it has not been —devised for the Adelphi Theatre. George Fielding, the emi- grating fanner, leaves, as we said, his betrothed behind him ; and it is to obtain the money which her father insists upon that he quits his Berkshire farm to seek wealth beyond the Pacific. But he leaves also behind him a rival and an enemy, in a Mr. Meadows, a man of middle age, of acknowledged respectability, of considerable wealth, and of relentless determination. He is the real instrument of Fielding's expatriation, with the object of sup- planting him with Susan Merton. It is the one overmastering

passion of Meadows's life, and to it he is ready to sacrifice every- thing and everybody. But Fielding has a friend in an old Jew

whom he has saved from Meadows's uplifted arm. Cannot the least experienced novel-reader supply the rest ? These two plot and counterplot : of course Meadows carries all before him ; the reader haying the most comfortable conviction that old Mr. LeYi

is weaving his web round the victor, and only waiting the mo- ment of triumph to crush, expose, and bale him. We do not doubt that the run of circulating library subscribers will be grate- ful to Mr. Reade for giving them exactly the vulgarest stimulus to their curiosity ; and if he thinks it a praise worth having, we are ready to admit that he has shown in the suspension of the de- nouement, and in the invention of the incidents that carry on this plot, the sort of talent that distinguishes Dumas the elder and our own Harrison Ainsworth. But in order to attain this success, he has violated that probability and keeping of character which are far higher virtues in fiction than any amount of startling sur- prises. Such a man as Meadows is not indeed an impossibility. A person of his character, once set upon an object with all his heart, would not be scrupulous as to his means; but it is scarcely credible that so clever a person would be silly enough to put him- self by his vilknies into the power of such wretched paltry con- federates as Mr. Reads has associated with Meadows. Nor is it very likely that, in order to baffle a rival whose sole strength lies in the devoted love of a girl, he should be compelled to oommit several misdemeanours, one forgery and false personation, one composition of felony, and finish up by hocussing and robbing of seven thousand pounds a traveller sleeping in a respectable inn-bedroom,—on the chance that by so Being he was depriving his rival of all his money, and so of the hope of win- ning his bride. This little list takes no account of such minor offences as employing agents to rob and lie. What we object to is, not the overmastering passion of Meadows, exceptional as such a feeling is in such a man ; nor to his unscrupulousness ; but to his being represented as a .person of infinite tact, address, resource, in fact a first-rate man in his sphere, and capable of fill- ing any sphere, and yet not having skill enough to accomplish his objects, or even to aim at their accomplishment, without falling into vulgar rascalities that bring him to the felon's dock at last, and expose him to be brought there at any moment of his long intrigue. The man of relentless will directed unscrupulously to the one object of supplanting his rival, and applied by a never- failing self-command and adroitness of intellect, coupled with a large knowledge of mankind in general, and a particular know- ledge of the persons he has to deal with, might surely have been made a more dramatically and psychologically interesting figure without all this inconsistency and improbability. But, with much of the knowledge of mankind which goes to make a good novelist, and with a corresponding power of presenting what he _knows, Mr. Reads appears to us to want the subtile discrimina- tion which is required to present a highly complex character and the action of conflicting motives. He is a master of simple pathos, of powerful eloquence, of striking description ; he can make well-defined characters talk naturally, and can deliver him- self forcibly of generous feelings and often of great practical good sense ; he has looked with an observant eye on the more or- dinary effects of character and passion ; but of the innermost life, of the struggles and the conflicts that are not re7ealed to observation and are not common to the majority of human kind, but have to be sought by the writer in the depths of his own na- ture stirred to action by imaginative sympathy, he appears to know but little. And this limitation leaves him still a vast and rich field : but in attempting to depict grand criminals—by which we do not mean persons guilty of heinous crimes—he will always be in danger of running into the melodramatic ; and the danger is in his case increased by his having been a writer for the stage, and retaining a strong and unmistakeable inclination for stage- effects.

The incongruity of the two elements in this novel is enhanced not only by the extremely matter-of-fact character of the prison scenes and the life at the diggings, but by the circumstance that the former are little more than a dramatized version of actual events of recent occurrence and newspaper notoriety, while the gold- discovery and the mode of life pursued amongst the diggers are also familiar matters of contemporary history. It produces a most unpleasant effect to be changed backwards and forwards between scenes, agencies, and characters, which we recognize as not only typically true to modern life, but actually borrowed from indi- vidual cases fresh in our remembrance, and those others which we recognize as equally true to the traditions of the Adelphi, and equally familiar to the august and plebeian visitors of that re- gion. As we said before, Mr. Reads might confidently have re- lied on his uncommon power of wading common life inters and he would have produced a novel which in that respect rait have been placed beside Defoe's novels, while his ardent sympa- thies for the victims of cruelty and stupidity, and his clear in- sight into the proper treatment of criminals, would have made him a welcome and a powerful coadjutor in the great cause of Striminal reformation. As it is, thousands will read his book with profit in spite of its faults of construction, and the two companion-portraits of gaol-governor Hawes and gaol-chaplain Eden ought to be studied with the deepest practical interest by all who have anything to do with the management of prisons. If such persons learn only one truth from their studies, that truth is about the deepest and of the most universal application ; and it is, that to reform human beings who have become outcasts from society, systems are not sufficient, and machinery is not sufficient, but men with hearts in their bosoms and brains in their heads are the one thing wanted. Systems and machinery are aids to individual exertion, and may regulate zeal, sympathy, and talent, 'bat would otherwise waste themselves in experiments that have been tried and found unavailing ; but they can never supersede these. This is the truth that Mr. Reads does his utuiiost to re- iterate and enforce ; and in his portrait of the gaol-claplain he draws the sort of man required to superintend a prison that is in- tended for reformation as well as punishment. Between Mr. Reade's new book and the two shorter nov which he was previously known there is more of contrast than aa resemblance. The characters in the present novel—with the melodramatic exceptions which we have noticed—are more on the level of ordinary life than the fascinating Miss Woffington and the piquant poetical Christie. A more serious, or at least a more practical purpose, pervades the present " matter-of-fact ro- mance " ; and, as it should be, the style is sobered and deepened to the material. Taken together, they are three very remarkable books, displaying great versatility and striking originality. If their author will for the future trust to his higher faculties, and not seek the aid of stage-conventionalities and tricks that amuse for the moment at the expense of permanent interest, he may at- tain a high place among writers of fiction, and may do this with- out sacrificing anything upon which even present popularity mea- sured by a worthy standard depends.