as many formulas as there
are artists. Therefore, while to few readers life casts the rosy
reflection that we have learned to call Besantine, one would not wish it
to disappear nor to be discredited.

It was in the year 1869 that Walter Besant, by a happy chance, made the
acquaintance of James Rice, the editor of Once a Week, and became a
contributor to that magazine. In 1871 that literary partnership between
them began, which is interesting in the history of collaboration. Mr.
Rice had been a barrister, and added legal lore to Mr. Besant's varied
and accurate literary equipment. The brilliant series of novels that
followed includes 'Ready-Money Morti-boy,' 'My Little Girl,' 'With Harp
and Crown,' 'The Golden Butterfly,' 'The Seamy Side,' and 'The Chaplain
of the Fleet.' The latter story, that of an innocent young country girl
left to the guardianship of her uncle, chaplain of the Fleet prison, by
the death of her father, is delicately and surprisingly original. The
influence of Dickens is felt in the structure 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 surroundi