this outspoken record. Such features of the book add not a little to the eagerness with which we follow the course of a singularly instructive and fascinating biography.

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when the fashion for mezzotints passed he turned his attention to miniature painting, strolling among the country towns in his search for clients. Long practice as an engraver had taught him to draw with acfig-curacy, and his best work had a certain delicate charm of color, but even at its best it lacked distinction, and Gosse was not the man to advertise himself, or carve out his road to fortune.

Philip Henry Gosse is not the only ure that claims minute study. His father, whose skill as a miniature painter was inherited by the naturalist, was a voluminous author, who yet never managed to secure the much coveted honor of publication for one of his many manuscript tales or poems. Gosse's mother, a yeoman's daughter without education or capacity to understand literature, but with a strength of purpose and sterling sense which made her a strange contrast to her dreamy husband, was such a character as Thomas Hardy might seize upon to figure in one of his Wessex novels. Nor must we over-ivory look the two gifted women to whom Philip Henry Gosse was married, and who both proved in their differing ways true helpers in his work. The sketch of her husband supplied by the second Mrs. Gosse as an appendix to this biography presents in its hero-worship a somewhat striking contrast to the severe candor of her stepson, but is not the less a touching tribute to his memory, written by one who filled the difficult post of stepmother with such "tact and gentleness and devotion through no less than thirty years "that she is called in these pages "that good genius of our house."

Such was the man who in the spring of 1807 stepped out of the Bath coach on its arrival at Worcester. His clothes spoke of waning respectability, his somewhat rueful countenance told the story of its owner's disappointments. He was in his forty-third year, tall and thin, with hair prematurely grey. Besides the box which contained colors, brushes, and leaves of - his stock in trade as a miniature portrait painter - he had a slender wardrobe with two books, his Bible and his Greek Theocritus, "which never quitted him, but formed, at the darkest moments of his career, a gate of instant exit from the hard facts of life into an idyllic world of glowing pastoral antiquity." Thomas Gosse was 66 ready to despair of life," as he entered the old cathedral city. But a change was coming over his lonely bachelor existence. At the house of his particular friend and patron, Mr. Green, Gosse met a girl of twenty-six, who had recently entered the family as "half lady's maid, half companion." Hannah Best come from Titton Brook, near Stourport, where her father was a small yeoman. Mrs. Best's tongue and temper were the scourge of that household. She would sometimes whip off her high-heeled shoe, and administer personal chastisement to her grown-up daughters. Smarting under such an outrage, Hannah had fled to Worcester. To the student of Theocritus, the girl's beauty, strength, and rusticity made her appear like a Sicilian shepherdess who had stepped out of the old poet's pages. Gosse fell hope|lessly in love. The girl shrank from the addresses of one so much older than herself. But she soon learned to appreciate his character, and to see what a door of Thomas Gosse was then nineteen. He escape the marriage opened to her in her studied at the Royal Academy schools, present anomalous position. The oddly under Sir Joshua Reynolds, and after-assorted couple were therefore married at wards gained a somewhat precarious living St. Nicholas Church, Worcester, on July as a mezzotint engraver; destitute of am- 15, 1807. bition or energy, and without a spark of business faculty, he grew familiar with disappointment and "sank lower and lower into the depths of genteel poverty." His scanty patrimony was soon exhausted, and

The Gosse family are said to have come over from France at the time of the Restoration. They settled at Ringwood, Hampshire, where the naturalist's grandfather, William Gosse, was a wealthy cloth manufacturer. The Gosses had carried on this business from the reign of Charles II. William Gosse had Welsh estates, which led to his being chosen high sheriff of Radnorshire, and he was in his day a local magnate at Ringwood. The introduction of machinery, which changed all the conditions of woollen manufacturing, much reduced his fortune. When he died there was little left for the naturalist's father, the eleventh of William Gosse's twelve children.

They at once set out together on pilgrimage. The omens were sadly discour aging, for at Gloucester their first halting place no one could be found to sit for a portrait. They fled in panic to

Bristol, where affairs proved more favor- | names," he said long afterwards, "I viv

able. Here their first son, William, was born in the following April. Two years later, on April 6, 1810, when they had returned to Worcester, the future naturalist was born in lodgings over the shop of Mr. Garner, the shoemaker, in High Street." After two or three years' experience of this migratory life, the young wife opened a grocer's shop on. her own account at Leicester. Here she remained whilst her husband set out on a tour through the west of England. Before he returned she had, however, discovered her own unfitness for the life of a shopkeeper, and was ready to accompany her husband to Poole, where three of his married sisters were living, and where it seemed as though there would be some chance of success for the struggling artist. In June, 1812, the family had taken furnished lodgings in the Old Orchard, at Poole.

The prosperous little seaport, with its red brick houses, had then a population of six thousand people. Its busy quay, with merchants, sailors, and fishermen bustling about, and piles of salt cod, barrels of train oil, and stores of fresh fish, was full of never flagging interest for the observ. ant boy, who grew up in the midst of this ever-changing life. 'Pilots, fishermen, boatmen of various grades, a loose-trousered, guernsey - frocked, sou'westered race, were always lounging about the quay.”

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idly recollect, and the whole scene." This was the first instance of the powers of memory and observation, which were afterwards so conspicuous in Gosse's work as a naturalist.

Another reminiscence may be referred to because it describes an experience which Gosse's father had known as a child, and which in turn tormented his son also: "I suffered when I was about five years old from some strange, indescribable dreams, which were repeated quite frequently. It was as if space was occupied with a multitude of concentric circles, the outer ones immeasurably vast, I myself being the common centre. They seemed to revolve and converge upon me, causing a most painful sensation of dread. I do not know that I had heard, and I was too young to have read, the description of Ezekiel's dreadful wheels.'

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The boy's love of nature awoke early. He had formed a friendship with a nephew of a lodger who had taken the place of the Poonah_painters. This was John_Hammond Brown, who, like Philip Gosse, found greater pleasure in a book than in a game with other boys. They eagerly studied the plates of animals in the "Encyclopædia Perthensis," and after a time began to copy them. Ar Aunt Bell, the wife of a Poole surgeon, who had a taste for natural history, was his first guide. When he found any interesting specimen the boy took it off to her for information. Gosse thus began to study the transformation of insects, and learned something about the sea anemones which he found around the quay at neap tides. Mrs. Bell also taught him to keep the anemones in a jug of sea-water, little thinking that her young pupil was by and by to make the aquarium a popular scientific toy in England.

The father soon had to start again on his rounds, but not before his family had been safely housed at No. 1 Skinner Street. His prosperous sisters helped with the furnishing, but did not conceal their feeling that their artist brother had married sadly beneath him. All this made things harder for the young and lonely wife. She was both superstitious and timid, so that she was glad to have her sleeping children in a crib in her parlor Gosse's mother looked somewhat until it was time to go to bed. She after- askance on these boyish hobbies, and wards secured some company by letting was terribly frightened when some green lodgings to two ladies who taught "Poo-lizards were brought home as a treasure in nah painting," an art which they kept a her elder son's handkerchief. She reprofound secret from all save the young garded them as venomous, and ordered ladies whom they initiated into the mys-them, to the great grief of the young natteries of "the Indian formulas."

uralist, to be instantly despatched.

Philip Gosse was two years and a month Mrs. Gosse had a struggling life. Her old when the family moved to Poole. In husband was not at home more than a travelling across country from Leicester, month or two in the year. His scanty a visit had been paid to Mrs. Gosse's par- earnings were largely spent on himself, ents at Titton Brook. Philip was in his yet the mother managed to keep her four mother's arms, when he saw a team of children clean and neat, "sufficiently fed oxen or horses pass along the main road, and decently educated." She had a horguided by the driver's cry: "Gee, Cap-ror of debt, and her rent was, with the tain ! Wo, Merryman!" "These two rarest exception, paid on the very day it

He never forgot the daily Bible readings | papist Irish no better than the rest of you." which his mother had enjoined upon him. It was a lesson which Philip Gosse did No ridicule had the slightest influence not forget. over one of whom his biographer could write that then, as always," his conscience was a law to him, and a law that he was prepared to obey in face of an army of ridicule drawn up in line of battle."

Office work was comparatively light from the middle of June, when the fleet sailed for Labrador, until the end of October, so that the young clerk was able to enjoy the brief summer. Jane Elson, his master's younger daughter, inspired the boy with his first love a few months after his arrival; but he kept his secret locked up in his own breast. She was present at

He found Carbonear a more important town than he had expected. The Labrador fishing fleet, consisting of seventy schooners, was just about to start on its usual expedition. After it sailed, the the only ball Gosse attended, and he obnew clerk took his place in the countinghouse. Here is his own description of himself: "I was thoroughly a greenhorn; fresh from my Puritan home and companionships; utterly ignorant of the world; raw, awkward, and unsophisticated; simple in countenance as unsuspicious in mind; the very quaintness of the costume in which I had been sent forth from the paternal nest told what a yokel I was. A surtout coat of snuff-brown hue, reaching to my ankles, and made out of a worn great-coat of my uncle Gosse's, which had been given to mother, enveloped my some. what sturdy body; for I was

Totus, teres, atque rotundus;

while my intellectual region rejoiced in the protection of a white hat (forsooth!) somewhat battered in sides and crown, and manifestly the worse for wear."

His elder brother, then rejoicing in the matured wisdom of nineteen, was still at Carbonear. He presented Philip with a code of regulations for his behavior in his new surroundings, which the boy scrupulously set himself to observe. One of his fellow clerks was a William Charles St. John, who belonged to a Protestant Tipperary family, which claimed relationship both with Lord Bolingbroke and Cromwell. This bright youth, full of fun and sparkling wit, became the bosom friend of the new clerk.

The state of affairs at Carbonear was not congenial. The Protestant population lived in habitual dread of the papist Irish, who were intensely jealous of the Saxon colony. It was necessary to guard your words in such a place. The new-comer made a pert reply to a captain's question about his impressions of Newfoundland: "I see little in it, except dogs and Irishmen." An ominous silence followed. At last, his brother, who was in the company, asked: "Do you not know that Mr. Moore is an Irishman?" Fortunately the captain came to his rescue. "There's no offence; I am an Ulsterman, and love the

tained the honor of escorting her home. "She took my arm; and there, under the moon, we walked for full half a mile, and not a word-literally, not a single word broke the awful silence! I felt the awkwardness most painfully; but the more I sought something to say, the more my tongue seemed tied to the roof of my mouth." His boyish passion gradually wore off, and the young lady married a merchant at St. John's.

After twelve months at Carbonear, Gosse was sent to a new office at St. Mary's. This seemed like exile. St. Mary's had only three or four hundred residents, mostly Irish laborers or fishermen. The managing clerk was a consequential fellow, who once told Gosse in the presence of the laborers, "You shan't be called Mr. Gosse any more; you shall be called plain Philip." Fortunately his clerk had an answer ready, "Very well; and I'll call you plain John." The laborers grinned approval of this well-merited snub.

After a few months in this dispiriting place Gosse returned to Carbonear. He travelled across the pathless snow with an old trapper and furrier, who regaled him with beaver's meat. "He declared to the end of his life that no flesh was so exquisite as the hind quarters of beaver roasted." The young clerk saw the otter-slides on the steep banks of a lake. Each of the otters in succession lay on its belly and slipped swiftly down the steep bank till it plunged into the water. Whilst the first was crawling up the bank again the other otters were on the slide. By the time they had enjoyed their fun the first otter was ready for another turn. The wet which dripped from their bodies froze as it fell, making a perfect gutter of ice. The old trapper had frequently seen this sport "continued with the utmost eagerness, and with every demonstration of delight for hours together." My father used to say," adds Mr. Edmund Gosse, "that he knew no other example of adult quadru

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