Neither of these writers, except, as has been said, perhaps Black in his earliest stage, had taken novel-writing very seriously:  it was otherwise with the third of the trio.  Mr., afterwards Sir Walter, Besant did not begin early, owing to the fact that, for nearly a decade after leaving Cambridge, he was a schoolmaster in Mauritius.  But he had, in this time, acquired a greater knowledge of literature than either of the other two possessed:  and when he came home, and took to fiction, he accompanied it with, or rather based it upon, not merely wide historical studies, which are still bearing fruit in a series of posthumous dealings with the history of London, but rather minute observation of the lower social life of the metropolis.  For some ten years his novel production was carried on, in a rather incomprehensible system of collaboration, with James Rice, a Cambridge man like himself and a historian of the turf, but one to whom no independent work in fiction is attributed, except an incredibly feeble adaptation of Mr. Verdant Green, entitled The Cambridge Freshman and signed “Martin Legrand.”  During the seventies, and for a year or two later, till Rice’s death in 1882, the pair provided along series of novels from Ready-Money Mortiboy (1871) to The Chaplain of the Fleet (1881), the most popular book between being, perhaps, The Golden Butterfly (1876).  These belonged, loosely, to the school of Dickens, as that school had been carried on by Wilkie Collins (v. inf.), but with less grotesque than the original master, and less “sensation” than the head pupil; with a good deal of solid knowledge both of older and more modern life; with fairly substantial plots, good character-drawing of the more external kind, and a sufficient supply of interesting incident, dialogue, and description.

It was certain that people would affect to discover a “falling off” when the partnership was dissolved by Rice’s death:  but as a matter of fact there was nothing of the kind.  Such books as the very good and original Revolt of Man (which certainly owed nothing to collaboration), as All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), the first of the kind apparently that Besant wrote alone, as Dorothy Forster (1884), and as the powerful if not exactly delightful Children of Gibeon (1886) were perhaps more vigorous than anything earlier, and certainly not less original.  But the curse of the “machine-made” novel, which has been already dwelt upon, did not quite spare Besant:  and in these later stories critics could point, without complete unfairness, to an increasing obsession of the “London” subject, especially in regard to the actual gloom and possible illumination of the East End, and on the other to a resort to historical subjects, less as suggestions or canvases than as giving the substance of the book.  The first class of work, however (which actually resulted in a “People’s Palace” and was supposed to have obtained his