select these aright, we feel sure that he will end by placing the
work of George Gissing upon a considerably higher level than he has
hitherto done.

The time has not yet come to write the history of his career--fuliginous in
not a few of its earlier phases, gathering serenity towards its
close,--finding a soul of goodness in things evil. This only pretends to be
a chronological and, quite incidentally, a critical survey of George
Gissing's chief works. And comparatively short as his working life proved
to be--hampered for ten years by the sternest poverty, and for nearly ten
more by the sad, illusive optimism of the poitrinaire--the task of the mere
surveyor is no light or perfunctory one. Artistic as his temperament
undoubtedly was, and conscientious as his writing appears down to its
minutest detail, Gissing yet managed to turn out rather more than a novel
per annum. The desire to excel acted as a spur which conquered his
congenital inclination to dreamy historical reverie. The reward which he
propounded to himself remained steadfast from boyhood; it was a kind of
_Childe Harold_ pilgrimage to the lands of antique story--

'Whither Albano's scarce divided waves
Shine from a sister valley;--and afar
The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves
The Latian coast where sprang the Epic War.'

Twenty-six years have elapsed since the appearance of his first book in
1880, and in that time just twenty-six books have been issued bearing his
signature. His industry was worthy of an Anthony Trollope, and cost his
employers barely a tithe of the amount claimed by the writer of _The Last
Chronicle of Barset_. He was not much over twenty-two when his first novel
appeared.[2] It was entitled _Workers in the Dawn_, and is distinguished by
the fact that the author writes himself George Robert Gissing; afterwards
he saw fit to follow the example of George Robert Borrow, and in all
subsequent productions assumes the style of 'George Gissing.' The book
begins in this fashion: 'Walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street. It
is Saturday night'; and it is what it here seems, a decidedly crude and
immature performance. Gissing was encumbered at every step by the giant's
robe of mid-Victorian fiction. Intellectual giants, Dickens and Thackeray,
were equally gigantic spendthrifts. They worked in a state of fervid heat
above a glowing furnace, into which they flung lavish masses of unshaped
metal, caring little for immediate e