The anonymously published _Demos_ (1886) can hardly be described as a typical product of George Gissing's mind and art. In it he subdued himself rather to the level of such popular producers as Besant and Rice, and went out of his way to procure melodramatic suspense, an ingredient far from congenial to his normal artistic temper. But the end justified the means. The novel found favour in the eyes of the author of _The Lost Sir Massingberd_, and Gissing for the first time in his life found himself the possessor of a full purse, with fifty 'jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid' in it. Its possession brought with it the realisation of a paramount desire, the desire for Greece and Italy which had become for him, as it had once been with Goethe, a scarce endurable suffering. The sickness of longing had wellnigh given way to despair, when 'there came into my hands a sum of money (such a poor little sum) for a book I had written. It was early autumn. I chanced to hear some one speak of Naples--and only death would have held me back.'[10] [Footnote 10: See _Emancipated_, chaps. iv.-xii.; _New Grub Street_, chap, xxvii.; _Ryecroft_, Autumn xix.; the short, not superior, novel called _Sleeping Fires_, 1895, chap. i. 'An encounter on the Kerameikos'; _The Albany_, Christmas 1904, p. 27; and _Monthly Review_, vol. xvi. 'He went straight by sea to the land of his dreams--Italy. It was still happily before the enterprise of touring agencies had fobbed the idea of Italian travel of its last vestiges of magic. He spent as much time as he could afford about the Bay of Naples, and then came on with a rejoicing heart to Rome--Rome, whose topography had been with him since boyhood, beside whose stately history the confused tumult of the contemporary newspapers seemed to him no more than a noisy, unmeaning persecution of the mind. Afterwards he went to Athens.']