Whatever the critics may determine as to the merit of the stories in the present volume, there can be no question as to the interest they derive from their connection with what had gone before. Thus _Topham's Chance_ is manifestly the outcome of material pondered as early as 1884. _The Lodger in Maze Pond_ develops in a most suggestive fashion certain problems discussed in 1894. Miss Rodney is a re-incarnation of Rhoda Nunn and Constance Bride. _Christopherson_ is a delicious expansion of a mood indicated in _Ryecroft_ (Spring xii.), and _A Capitalist_ indicates the growing interest in the business side of practical life, the dawn of which is seen in _The Town Traveller_ and in the discussion of Dickens's potentialities as a capitalist. The very artichokes in _The House of Cobwebs_ (which, like the kindly hand that raised them, alas! fell a victim to the first frost of the season) are suggestive of a charming passage detailing the retired author's experience as a gardener. What Dr. Furnivall might call the 'backward reach' of every one of these stories will render their perusal delightful to those cultivated readers of Gissing, of whom there are by no means a few, to whom every fragment of his suave and delicate workmanship 'repressed yet full of power, vivid though sombre in colouring,' has a technical interest and charm. Nor will they search in vain for Gissing's incorrigible mannerisms, his haunting insistence upon the note of 'Dort wo du nicht bist ist das Glück,' his tricks of the brush in portraiture, his characteristic epithets, the _dusking_ twilight, the _decently ignoble_ penury, the _not ignoble_ ambition, the _not wholly base_ riot of the senses in early manhood. In my own opinion we have here in _The Scrupulous Father_, and to a less degree, perhaps, in the first and last of these stories, and in _A Poor Gentleman_ and _Christopherson_, perfectly characteristic and quite admirable specimens of Gissing's own genre, and later, unstudied, but always finished prose style. * * * * * But a few words remain to be said, and these, in part at any rate, in recapitulation. In the old race, of which Dickens and Thackeray were representative, a successful determination to rise upon the broad back of popularity coincided with a growing conviction that the evil in the world was steadily diminishing. Like healthy schoolboys who have worked their way up to the sixth form, they imagined that the bullying of which they had had to complain was become pretty much a thing of the past. In Gissing the misery inherent in the sharp contrasts of modern life was a far more deeply ingrained conviction. He cared little for the remedial aspect of the question. His idea was to analyse this misery as an artist and to express it to the world.