Sea, the unrivalled presentment of Charles Dickens, and that gentle masterpiece of softened autobiography, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (its resignation and autumnal calm, its finer note of wistfulness and wide human compassion, fully deserve comparison with the priceless work of Silvio Pellico) in which he indulged himself during the last and increasingly prosperous years of his life, then Gissing’s style is discovered to be a charmed instrument.  That he will sup late, our Gissing, we are quite content to believe.  But that a place is reserved for him, of that at any rate we are reasonably confident.  The three books just named, in conjunction with his short stories and his New Grub Street (not to mention Thyrza or The Nether World), will suffice to ensure him a devout and admiring group of followers for a very long time to come; they accentuate profoundly the feeling of vivid regret and almost personal loss which not a few of his more assiduous readers experienced upon the sad news of his premature death at St. Jean de Luz on the 28th December 1903, at the early age of forty-six.

ACTON,

February 1906.

A CHRONOLOGICAL RECORD

1880.  Workers in the Dawn. 1884.  The Unclassed. 1886.  Isabel Clarendon. 1886.  Demos. 1887.  Thyrza. 1888.  A Life’s Morning. 1889.  The Nether World. 1890.  The Emancipated. 1891.  New Grub Street. 1892.  Born in Exile. 1892.  Denzil Quarrier. 1893.  The Odd Women. 1894.  In the Year of Jubilee. 1895.  The Paying Guest. 1895.  Sleeping Fires. 1895.  Eve’s Ransom. 1897.  The Whirlpool. 1898.  Human Odds and Ends:  Stories and Sketches. 1898.  The Town Traveller. 1898.  Charles Dickens:  a Critical Study. 1899.  The Crown of Life. 1901.  Our Friend the Charlatan. 1901.  By the Ionian Sea.  Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy. 1903.  Forster’s Life of Dickens—­Abridgement. 1903.  The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. 1904.  Veranilda:  a Romance. 1905.  Will Warburton:  a Romance of Real Life. 1906.  The House of Cobwebs, and other Stories.

[Of notices and reviews of George Gissing other than those mentioned in the foregoing notes the following is a selection:—­Times, 29 Dec. 1903; Guardian, 6 Jan. 1904; Outlook, 2 Jan. 1904; Sphere, 9 Jan. 1904; Athenaeum, 2 and 16 Jan. 1904; Academy, 9 Jan. 1904 (pp. 40 and 46); New York Nation, 11 June 1903 (an adverse but interesting paper on the anti-social side of Gissing); The Bookman (New York), vol. xviii.; Independent Review, Feb. 1904; Fortnightly Review, Feb. 1904; Contemporary Review, Aug. 1897; C.F.G.  Masterman’s In Peril of Change, 1905, pp. 68-73; Atlantic Monthly, xciii. 280; Upton Letters, 1905, p. 206.]

THE HOUSE OF COBWEBS