Read it through once

“In my opinion it is overloaded with civil notes, and too full of carelessnesses and trifling repetitions.... Nevertheless, I myself prefer it to my other prose works, both as bolder and more various and deeper in sentiment, and as containing one character (a sort of embodiment of the strong sense and right feeling which I believe to be common in the middling classes, emphatically _the people_) which appears and reappears in several of the stories, giving comfortable proof of the power to carry on a strongly distinguished character through three volumes which, if I do not comply (as I suppose I must) with Mr. Bentley’s desire for a novel, will be very valuable.”