course of this evolution, in the vain attempt to win beauty by gratitude and humility, the timid Hilliard, who seeks to propitiate his charmer by ransoming her from a base liaison and supporting her in luxury for a season in Paris, is thrown off like an old glove when a richer parti declares himself.  The subtlety of the portraiture and the economy of the author’s sympathy for his hero impart a subacid flavour of peculiar delicacy to the book, which would occupy a high place in the repertoire of any lesser artist.  It well exhibits the conflict between an exaggerated contempt for, and an extreme susceptibility to, the charm of women which has cried havoc and let loose the dogs of strife upon so many able men.  In The Whirlpool of 1897, in which he shows us a number of human floats spinning round the vortex of social London,[21] Gissing brings a melodramatic plot of a kind disused since the days of Demos to bear upon the exhausting lives and illusive pleasures of the rich and cultured middle class.  There is some admirable writing in the book, and symptoms of a change of tone (the old inclination to whine, for instance, is scarcely perceptible) suggestive of a new era in the work of the novelist—­relatively mature in many respects as he now manifestly was.  Further progress in one of two directions seemed indicated:  the first leading towards the career of a successful society novelist ’of circulating fame, spirally crescent,’ the second towards the frame of mind that created Ryecroft.  The second fortunately prevailed.  In the meantime, in accordance with a supreme law of his being, his spirit craved that refreshment which Gissing found in revisiting Italy.  ‘I want,’ he cried, ’to see the ruins of Rome:  I want to see the Tiber, the Clitumnus, the Aufidus, the Alban Hills, Lake Trasimenus!  It is strange how these old times have taken hold of me.  The mere names in Roman history make my blood warm.’  Of him the saying of Michelet was perpetually true:  ’J’ai passe a cote du monde, et j’ai pris l’histoire pour la vie.’  His guide-books in Italy, through which he journeyed in 1897 (en prince as compared with his former visit, now that his revenue had risen steadily to between three and four hundred a year), were Gibbon, his semper eadem, Lenormant (la Grande-Grece), and Cassiodorus, of whose epistles, the foundation of the material of Veranilda, he now began to make a special study.  The dirt, the poverty, the rancid oil, and the inequable climate of Calabria must have been a trial and something of a disappointment to him.  But physical discomfort and even sickness was whelmed by the old and overmastering enthusiasm, which combined with his hatred of modernity and consumed Gissing as by fire.  The sensuous and the emotional sides of his experience are blended with the most subtle artistry in his By the Ionian Sea, a short volume of impressions, unsurpassable in its kind, from which we cannot refrain two characteristic extracts:—­