as to the management of butlers by the wife of a popular prelate. With what
a sincere recollection of this time he enjoins his readers (after Dr.
Johnson) to abstain from Poverty. 'Poverty is the great secluder.' 'London
is a wilderness abounding in anchorites.' Gissing was sustained amid all
these miseries by two passionate idealisms, one of the intellect, the other
of the emotions. The first was ancient Greece and Rome--and he incarnated
this passion in the picturesque figure of Julian Casti (in _The
Unclassed_), toiling hard to purchase a Gibbon, savouring its grand epic
roll, converting its driest detail into poetry by means of his enthusiasm,
and selecting Stilicho as a hero of drama or romance (a premonition here of
_Veranilda_). The second or heart's idol was Charles Dickens--Dickens as
writer, Dickens as the hero of a past England, Dickens as humorist, Dickens
as leader of men, above all, Dickens as friend of the poor, the outcast,
the pale little sempstress and the downtrodden Smike.

[Footnote 5: _Isabel Clarendon_. By George Gissing. In two volumes, 1886
(Chapman and Hall). In reviewing this work the _Academy_ expressed
astonishment at the mature style of the writer--of whom it admitted it had
not yet come across the name.]

In the summer of 1870, Gissing remembered with a pious fidelity of detail
the famous drawing of the 'Empty Chair' being framed and hung up 'in the
school-room, at home'[6] (Wakefield).

[Footnote 6: Of Gissing's early impressions, the best connected account, I
think, is to be gleaned from the concluding chapters of _The Whirlpool_;
but this may be reinforced (and to some extent corrected, or, here and
there cancelled) by passages in _Burn in Exile_ (vol. i.) and in
_Ryecroft_. The material there supplied is confirmatory in the best sense
of the detail contributed by Mr. Wells to the cancelled preface of