days, he discussed champagne vintages with his publisher, or was consulted as to the management of butlers by the wife of a popular prelate. With what a sincere recollection of this time he enjoins his readers (after Dr. Johnson) to abstain from Poverty. 'Poverty is the great secluder.' 'London is a wilderness abounding in anchorites.' Gissing was sustained amid all these miseries by two passionate idealisms, one of the intellect, the other of the emotions. The first was ancient Greece and Rome--and he incarnated this passion in the picturesque figure of Julian Casti (in _The Unclassed_), toiling hard to purchase a Gibbon, savouring its grand epic roll, converting its driest detail into poetry by means of his enthusiasm, and selecting Stilicho as a hero of drama or romance (a premonition here of _Veranilda_). The second or heart's idol was Charles Dickens--Dickens as writer, Dickens as the hero of a past England, Dickens as humorist, Dickens as leader of men, above all, Dickens as friend of the poor, the outcast, the pale little sempstress and the downtrodden Smike. [Footnote 5: _Isabel Clarendon_. By George Gissing. In two volumes, 1886 (Chapman and Hall). In reviewing this work the _Academy_ expressed astonishment at the mature style of the writer--of whom it admitted it had not yet come across the name.] In the summer of 1870, Gissing remembered with a pious fidelity of detail the famous drawing of the 'Empty Chair' being framed and hung up 'in the school-room, at home'[6] (Wakefield). [Footnote 6: Of Gissing's early impressions, the best connected account, I think, is to be gleaned from the concluding chapters of _The Whirlpool_; but this may be reinforced (and to some extent corrected, or, here and there cancelled) by passages in _Burn in Exile_ (vol. i.) and in _Ryecroft_. The material there supplied is confirmatory in the best sense of the detail contributed by Mr. Wells to the cancelled preface of _Veranilda_, touching the 'schoolboy, obsessed by a consuming passion for learning, at the Quaker's boarding-school at Alderley. He had come thither from Wakefield at the age of thirteen--after the death of his father, who was, in a double sense, the cardinal formative influence in his life. The tones of his father's voice, his father's gestures, never departed from him; when he read aloud, particularly if it was poetry he read, his father returned in him. He could draw in those days with great skill and vigour--it will seem significant to many that he was particularly fascinated by Hogarth's work, and that he copied and imitated it; and his father's well-stocked library, and his father's encouragement, had quickened his imagination and given it its enduring bias for literary activity.' Like Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, Borrow, Dickens, Eliot, 'G.C.' is, half involuntarily, almost unconsciously autobiographic.]