-gang. For he had been virtually chained to the desk, perpetually
working, imprisoned in a London lodging, owing to the literal lack of the
means of locomotion.[18] His most strenuous work, wrung from him in dismal
darkness and wrestling of spirit, was now achieved. Yet it seems to me both
ungrateful and unfair to say, as has frequently been done, that his
subsequent work was consistently inferior. In his earlier years, like
Reardon, he had destroyed whole books--books he had to sit down to when his
imagination was tired and his fancy suffering from deadly fatigue. His
corrections in the days of _New Grub Street_ provoked not infrequent,
though anxiously deprecated, remonstrance from his publisher's reader. Now
he wrote with more assurance and less exhaustive care, but also with a
perfected experience. A portion of his material, it is true, had been
fairly used up, and he had henceforth to turn to analyse the sufferings of
well-to-do lower middle-class families, people who had 'neither inherited
refinement nor acquired it, neither proletarian nor gentlefolk, consumed
with a disease of vulgar pretentiousness, inflated with the miasma of
democracy.' Of these classes it is possible that he knew less, and
consequently lacked the sureness of touch and the fresh draughtsmanship
which comes from ample knowledge, and that he had, consequently, to have
increasing resort to books and to invention, to hypothesis and theory.[19]
On the other hand, his power of satirical writing was continually expanding
and developing, and some of his very best prose is contained in four of
these later books: _In the Year of Jubilee_ (1894), _Charles Dickens_
(1898), _By the Ionian Sea_ (1901), and _The Private Papers of Henry
Ryecroft_ (1903); not far below any of which must be rated four others,
_The Odd Women_ (1893), _Eve's Ransom_ (1895), _The Whirlpool_ (1897), and
_Will Warburton_ (1905), to which may be added the two collections of short
stories.

[Footnote 17: Followed in 1897 by _The Whirlpool_ (see p. xvi), and in 1899
and 1903 by two books containing a like infusion of autobiographical
experience, _The Crown of Life_, technically admirable in chosen passages,
but sadly lacking in the freshness of first-hand, and _The Private Papers
of Henry Ryecroft_, one of the rightest and ripest of all his productions.]

[Footnote 18: 'I hardly knew what it was to travel by omnibus. I have
walked London streets for twelve and fifteen hours together wi