Which indeed it did; leaving all the virtuous characters abundantly satisfied, a feeling that will, I am sure, be shared by Mrs. Rawson's maze-loving public. * * * * * Robert Tressall was a house-painter, a Socialist, and very evidently a sincere if somewhat raw thinker. He left to his heirs and assigns a manuscript of many thousand words. It was a novel, oddly entitled _The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists_ (Grant Richards), and fell into the hands of Miss Jessie Pope, who recognised the genius in it (none too strong a word), made some excisions, and now stands sponsor for it to the world. It is a grim story of the unpicturesque and horribly anxious lives of working-folk, specifically of the house-painter and his mates working on a job, elated and satisfied at the beginning, depressed and despondent as the work nears completion with the uncertainty as to how long it will be before another job comes along. Nobody who hadn't lived exclusively in this hard environment could have written with such candour and intensity. Mr. Tressall has avoided altogether the pretentiousness and literary affectation that betrayed, for example, Mr. H. G. Wells' bathchairman, Meeks. The earlier part of the book is better than the later, where the propagandist ousts the chronicler. The exposition of Socialist doctrine is made with a considerable if a crude skill. It is disfigured with certain familiar limitations; the author can recognise no work except that done with the hands; and, whether by unhappy accident of actual circumstance or through defect of temperament, he sees his employers with a disproportionate bitterness that somewhat discounts his indictment, while he views his fellow-workmen from rather a disdainful height. But _The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists_ is a book to be read by any who want an insight into the conditions of working-class life at its average, with its virtues, its vices, its courage, its intolerable piteous anxieties. * * * * *