ISSING, GEORGE, an English novelist; born at Wakefield, November 22, 1857; died at London, December 28, 1903. His father was Thomas Waller Gissing, an eminent botanist. He was educated at a private school in his native town. His first novel, The Unclassed, appeared in 1884, followed by Demos (1886); Isabel Clarendon (1886); Thyrza (1887); A Life's Morning (1888); The Nether World (1889); The Emancipated (1890); New Grub Street (1891); Born in Exile (1892); Denzil Quarrier (1892); The Odd Woman (1893); In the Year of Jubilee (1894); Eve's Ransom (1895); The Whirlpool (1897); Human Odds and Ends (1897); The Town Traveler (1898); Charles Dickens, a critical essay (1898); The Crown of Life (1899); Our Friend the Charlatan (1900); By the Ionian Sea (1901); Veranilda (1904); and Will Warburton (1905).

Mr. Gissing's early work was the outcome of his study of life among the London masses, and while his descriptions of the slums were half repulsive, they were powerful and showed his wondrous powers as a realist. Of his personality his fellow novelist, H. G. Wells, wrote in the Monthly Review:

"He was of rather more than average stature, finely proportioned, and, save for a droop of the shoulders and that slight failure from grace that neglect of exercise entails, he carried himself well . . . He had quite distinctly a presence. His voice was round and full, and a youth in which books had overtopped experience had made his diction more bookish and rotund than is comHe was at first a little shy in intercourse, but

mon.

then intelligent, self-forgetful, inaggressive, and enthusi astic."

At his death Mr. Gissing left unfinished the book which was to come nearer to realizing his life's ambition than any he had ever planned. All his passion at school was for the classics; he coached Frederic Harrison's sons in Greek; his conversation, when he warmed, was winged with fragments of old choruses and fine quotations; and after his first visit to Italy he was never tired of descanting on the glories of ancient Rome and the memories of his favorite Virgil. It was in this vein that he started Veranilda, a task that occupied him for over two years; and his last letters show how much intellectual stress it laid on him. "I am now well past the middle of 'Veranilda,'" he wrote some time before the end, "and hope (with trembling) that I may finish by the end of the year."

Veranilda is prefaced with an appreciative introduction by Frederic Harrison, who has known "the whole literary career of George Gissing from the first to the last," and who describes the story as follows:

"Veranilda, a story of Roman and Goth," is a historical romance constructed on a plan most unusual in the conventional historical novel. It deals with real historical personages and actual historical events; and it is composed after long and minute study of the best contemporary sources and what remains of the literature of the time. The epoch of the tale is the sixth century, the age of Justinian and Belisarius. The scene is Rome, Central and Southern Italy, a country which was carefully studied by the author in his Italian travels. The period and the events are covered by the fourth volume of Dr. Hodgkin's great work, "Italy and Her Invaders." But the setting of the tale itself was drawn, not from any modern complications, but from local observa

Mr. Harrison thinks that this romance contains the late author's "best and most original work." It is composed, in his opinion, "with a wider and higher scope, a more mellow tone than the studies of contemporary life which first made his fame."

JOY AND SORROW.

To a certain point, we may follow with philosophic curiosity, step by step, the progress of mental anguish, but when that point is passed, analysis loses its interest; the vocabulary of pain has exhausted itself, the phenomena already noted do but repeat themselves with more rapidity, with more intensity-detail is lost in the mere sense of throes. Perchance the mind is capable of suffering worse than the fiercest pangs of hopeless love combined with jealousy; one would not pretend to put a limit to the possibilities of human woe; but for Mallard, at all events this night did the black flood of misery reach high-water mark.

What joy in the world that does not represent a counterbalance of sorrow? What blessedness poured upon one head but some other must therefore lie down under malediction? We know that with the uttermost of happiness there is wont to come a sudden blending of troublous humour. May it not be that the soul has conceived a subtle sympathy with that hapless one but for whose sacrifice its own elation were impossible? The Emancipated.

MATERNITY.

To the average woman maternity is absorbing. Naturally so, for the average woman is incapable of poetical passion, and only too glad to find something that occupies her thoughts from morning to night, a relief from the weariness of her unfruitful mind. It was not to be expected that Cecily, because she had given birth to a child, should of a sudden convert herself into a combination of wet and dry nurse, after the common model.

The mother's love was strong in her, but it could not destroy, nor even keep in long abeyance, those intellectual energies which characterized her. Had she been constrained to occupy herself ceaselessly with the demands of babyhood, something more than impatience would shortly have been roused in her: she would have rebelled against the conditions of her sex; the gentle melancholy with which she now looked back upon the early days of marriage would have become a bitter protest against her slavery to nature. These possibilities in the modern woman correspond to that spirit in the modern man which is in revolt against the law of labour. Picture Reuben Elgar reduced to the necessity of toiling for daily bread-that is to say, brought down from his pleasant heights of civilization to the dull plain where nature tells a man that if he would eat he must first sweat at the furrow; one hears his fierce objurgations, his haughty railing against the gods. Cecily did not represent that extreme type of woman to whom the bearing of children has become in itself repugnant; but she was very far removed from that other type which the world at large still makes its ideal of the feminine. With what temper would she have heard the lady in her aunt's drawing-room, who was of opinion that she should "stay at home and mind the baby"? Education had made her an individual; she was nurtured into the disease of thought. This child of hers showed in the frail tenure on which it held its breath how unfit the mother was for fulfilling her natural functions. Both parents seemed in admirable health, yet their offspring was a poor, delicate, nervous creature, formed for exquisite sensibility to every evil of life. Cecily saw this, and partly understood it; her heart was heavy through the long anxious nights passed in watching by the cradle.- The Emancipated.