six have visages so deformed by ill-health
that they excite disgust; their hair is cut down to within half an
inch of the scalp; their legs are twisted out of shape by evil
conditions of life from birth upwards. Whenever a youth and a girl
come along arm-in-arm, how flagrantly shows the man's coarseness! They
are pretty, so many of these girls, delicate of feature, graceful did
but their slavery allow them natural development; and the heart sinks
as one sees them side by side with the men who are to be their
husbands....

On the terraces dancing has commenced; the players of violins,
concertinas, and penny whistles do a brisk trade among the groups
eager for a rough-and-tumble valse; so do the pickpockets. Vigorous
and varied is the jollity that occupies the external galleries,
filling now in expectation of the fireworks; indescribable the mingled
tumult that roars heavenwards. Girls linked by the half-dozen
arm-in-arm leap along with shrieks like grotesque maenads; a rougher
horseplay finds favour among the youths, occasionally leading to
fisticuffs. Thick voices bellow in fragmentary chorus; from every side
comes the yell, the cat-call, the ear-rending whistle; and as the
bass, the never-ceasing accompaniment, sounds the myriad-footed tramp,
tramp along the wooden flooring. A fight, a scene of bestial
drunkenness, a tender whispering between two lovers, proceed
concurrently in a space of five square yards. Above them glimmers the
dawn of starlight.'--(pp. 109-11.)

From the delineation of this profoundly depressing milieu, by the aid of
which, if the fate of London and Liverpool were to-morrow as that of
Herculaneum and Pompeii, we should be able to reconstruct the gutters of
our Imperial cities (little changed in essentials since the days of
Domitian), Gissing turned his sketch-book to the scenery of rural England.
He makes no attempt at the rich colouring of Kingsley or Blackmore, but, as
page after page of _Ryecroft_ testifies twelve years later, he is a perfect
master of the _aquarelle_.

'The distance is about five miles, and, until Danbury Hill is reached,
the countryside has no point of interest to distinguish it from any
other representative bit of rural Essex. It is merely one of those
quiet corners of flat, homely England, where man and beast seem on
good terms with each other, where all green th