ngs, where the fight is not a hand-to-hand struggle
with bitter poverty or crime, but with dullness and monotony. The
characters in 'All Sorts and Conditions of Men' are possibly more
typical than real, but one hesitates to question either characters or
situation. The "impossible story" has become true, and the vision that
the enthusiastic young hero and heroine dream has materialized into a
lovely reality.

'The Children of Gibeon' (1884) and 'The World Went Very Well Then'
(1885) are written with the same philanthropic purpose; but if Sir
Walter Besant were not first of all a story-teller, the possessor of a
living voice that holds one spellbound till he has finished his tale,
the reader would be more sensible of the wide knowledge of the novelist,
and his familiarity with life in its varied forms.

Here are about thirty novels, displaying an intimate knowledge of many
crafts, trades, and professions, the ways of landsman and voyager, of
country and town, of the new world and the old, of modern charlatanism
as shown in 'Herr Paulus,' of the "woman question" among London Jews as
in the 'Rebel Queen,' and the suggestion of the repose and sufficiency
of life's simple needs as told in 'Call Her Mine' and 'Celia's Arbor.'

In the 'Ivory Gate' the hero is the victim of a remarkable
hallucination; in the story of 'The Inner House' the plummet of
suggestion plunges into depths not sounded before, and the soul's
regeneration is unfolded in the loveliest of parables.

The range of Sir Walter Besant reaches from the somewhat
conventionalized 'Dorothy Forster' to 'St. Katharine's Tower,' where
deep tragedy approaches the melodramatic, or from the fascination of
'The Master Craftsman' to the 'Wapping Idyll' of the heaps of miser's
treasure. There is largeness of stroke in this list, and a wide
prospect. His humor is of the cheerful outdoor kind, and the laugh is at
foibles rather than weakness. He pays little attention to fashion in
literature, except to give a good-natured nod to a passing fad.

It would be difficult to classify him under any school. His stories are
not analytical, nor is one conscious of that painstaking fidelity to art
which is no longer classed among the minor virtues. When he fights, it
is with wrong and oppression and the cheerless monotony of the lives of
the poor; but he fights classes rather than individuals, although
certain characters like Fielding the plagiarist, in 'Armorel of
Lyonesse,' are stud