of the story, and the faithful, almost photographic fidelity to locality betrays in whose footsteps the authors have followed; but the chaplain, though he belongs to a family whose features are familiar to the readers of ’Little Dorrit’ and ‘Great Expectations,’ has not existed until he appears in these pages,—­pompous, clever, and without principle, but not lacking in natural affection.  The young girl whose guileless belief in everybody forces the worst people to assume the characters her purity and innocence endows them with, is to the foul prison what Picciola was to Charney.  Nor will the moralist find fault with the author whose kind heart teaches him to include misfortune in his catalogue of virtues.

Mr. Rice died in 1882, and ‘All Sorts and Conditions of Men,’ Mr. Besant’s first independent novel, appeared the same year.  It is a novel with a purpose, and accomplished its purpose because an artist’s hand was necessary to paint the picture of East London that met with such a response as the People’s Palace.  The appeal to philanthropy was a new one.  It was a plea for a little more of the pleasures and graces of life for the two million of people who inhabit the east end of the great city.  It is not a picture of life in the lowest phases, where the scenes are as dramatic as in the highest social world, but a story of human life; the nobility, the meanness, the pathos of it in hopelessly commonplace surroundings, where the fight is not a hand-to-hand struggle with bitter poverty or crime, but with dullness and monotony.  The characters in ‘All Sorts and Conditions of Men’ are possibly more typical than real, but one hesitates to question either characters or situation.  The “impossible story” has become true, and the vision that the enthusiastic young hero and heroine dream has materialized into a lovely reality.

‘The Children of Gibeon’ (1884) and ‘The World Went Very Well Then’ (1885) are written with the same philanthropic purpose; but if Sir Walter Besant were not first of all a story-teller, the possessor of a living voice that holds one spellbound till he has finished his tale, the reader would be more sensible of the wide knowledge of the novelist, and his familiarity with life in its varied forms.

Here are about thirty novels, displaying an intimate knowledge of many crafts, trades, and professions, the ways of landsman and voyager, of country and town, of the new world and the old, of modern charlatanism as shown in ‘Herr Paulus,’ of the “woman question” among London Jews as in the ‘Rebel Queen,’ and the suggestion of the repose and sufficiency of life’s simple needs as told in ‘Call Her Mine’ and ‘Celia’s Arbor.’

In the ‘Ivory Gate’ the hero is the victim of a remarkable hallucination; in the story of ‘The Inner House’ the plummet of suggestion plunges into depths not sounded before, and the soul’s regeneration is unfolded in the loveliest of parables.