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126 Are you not born of a good family? Have you not had at Oxford the best education England is able to give to her children? Have you not had the highest connections? And, nevertheless, how low you have fallen! Do you know why? I have warned my Tito over and over again against it: because you have always done that only which was agreeable to you, and have shunned everything that was unpleasant."

This sounds like sad trifling to our sober and orthodox ears, but it is not more audacious, on the whole, than the pathetic lamentations of Mr. Oscar Wilde over the career of Charles Reade: the most disheartening, he protests, in all literature; "wasted in a foolish attempt to be modern, and to draw attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough, in all conscience, when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the poor-law administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of modern life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational