In _Veranilda_ (1904) are combined conscientious workmanship, a pure style of finest quality, and archaeology, for all I know to the contrary, worthy of Becker or Boni. Sir Walter himself could never in reason have dared to aspire to such a fortunate conjuncture of talent, grace, and historic accuracy. He possessed only that profound knowledge of human nature, that moulding humour and quick sense of dialogue, that live, human, and local interest in matters antiquarian, that statesmanlike insight into the pith and marrow of the historic past, which makes one of Scott's historical novels what it is--the envy of artists, the delight of young and old, the despair of formal historians. _Veranilda_ is without a doubt a splendid piece of work; Gissing wrote it with every bit of the care that his old friend Biffen expended upon _Mr. Bailey, grocer_. He worked slowly, patiently, affectionately, scrupulously. Each sentence was as good as he could make it, harmonious to the ear, with words of precious meaning skilfully set; and he believed in it with the illusion so indispensable to an artist's wellbeing and continuance in good work. It represented for him what _Salammbô_ did to Flaubert. But he could not allow himself six years to write a book as Flaubert did. _Salammbô_, after all, was a magnificent failure, and _Veranilda_,--well, it must be confessed, sadly but surely, that _Veranilda_ was a failure too. Far otherwise was it with _Ryecroft_, which represents, as it were, the _summa_ of Gissing's habitual meditation, aesthetic feeling and sombre emotional experience. Not that it is a pessimistic work,--quite the contrary, it represents the mellowing influences, the increase of faith in simple, unsophisticated English girlhood and womanhood, in domestic pursuits, in innocent children, in rural homeliness and honest Wessex landscape, which began to operate about 1896, and is seen so unmistakably in the closing scenes of _The Whirlpool_. Three chief strains are subtly interblended in the composition. First that of a nature book, full of air, foliage and landscape--that English landscape art of Linnell and De Wint and Foster, for which he repeatedly expresses such a passionate tendre,[24] refreshed by 'blasts from the channel, with raining scud and spume of mist breaking upon the hills' in which he seems to crystallise the very essence of a Western winter. Secondly, a paean half of praise and half of regret for the vanishing England, passing so rapidly even as he writes into 'a new England which tries so hard to be unlike the old.' A deeper and richer note of thankfulness, mixed as it must be with anxiety, for the good old ways of English life (as lamented by Mr. Poorgrass and Mark Clark[25]), old English simplicity, and old English fare--the fine prodigality of the English platter, has never been raised. God grant that the leaven may work! And thirdly there is a deeply brooding strain of saddening yet softened