’I always turn out of my way to walk through a country churchyard; these rural resting-places are as attractive to me as a town cemetery is repugnant.  I read the names upon the stones and find a deep solace in thinking that for all these the fret and the fear of life are over.  There comes to me no touch of sadness; whether it be a little child or an aged man, I have the same sense of happy accomplishment; the end having come, and with it the eternal peace, what matter if it came late or soon?  There is no such gratulation as Hic jacet.  There is no such dignity as that of death.  In the path trodden by the noblest of mankind these have followed; that which of all who live is the utmost thing demanded, these have achieved.  I cannot sorrow for them, but the thought of their vanished life moves me to a brotherly tenderness.  The dead amid this leafy silence seem to whisper encouragement to him whose fate yet lingers:  As we are, so shalt thou be; and behold our quiet!’—­(p. 183.)

And in this deeply moving and beautiful passage we get a foretaste, it may be, of the euthanasia, following a brief summer of St. Martin, for which the scarred and troublous portions of Gissing’s earlier life had served as a preparation.  Some there are, no doubt, to whom it will seem no extravagance in closing these private pages to use the author’s own words, of a more potent Enchanter:  ’As I close the book, love and reverence possess me.’

* * * * *

Whatever the critics may determine as to the merit of the stories in the present volume, there can be no question as to the interest they derive from their connection with what had gone before.  Thus Topham’s Chance is manifestly the outcome of material pondered as early as 1884. The Lodger in Maze Pond develops in a most suggestive fashion certain problems discussed in 1894.  Miss Rodney is a re-incarnation of Rhoda Nunn and Constance Bride. Christopherson is a delicious expansion of a mood indicated in Ryecroft (Spring xii.), and A Capitalist indicates the growing interest in the business side of practical life, the dawn of which is seen in The Town Traveller and in the discussion of Dickens’s potentialities as a capitalist.  The very artichokes in The House of Cobwebs (which, like the kindly hand that raised them, alas! fell a victim to the first frost of the season) are suggestive of a charming passage detailing the retired author’s experience as a gardener.  What Dr. Furnivall might call the ‘backward reach’ of every one of these stories will render their perusal delightful to those cultivated readers of Gissing, of whom there are by no means a few, to whom every fragment of his suave and delicate workmanship ’repressed yet full of power, vivid though sombre in colouring,’ has a technical interest and charm.  Nor will they search in vain for Gissing’s incorrigible mannerisms, his haunting insistence upon the note of ‘Dort