ffect or minute dexterity of stroke,
but knowing full well that the emotional energy of their temperaments was
capable of fusing the most intractable material, and that in the end they
would produce their great, downright effect. Their spirits rose and fell,
but the case was desperate, copy had to be despatched for the current
serial. Good and bad had to make up the tale against time, and revelling in
the very exuberance and excess of their humour, the novelists invariably
triumphed.

[Footnote 2: Three vols. 8vo, 1880 (Remington). It was noticed at some
length in the _Athenoeum_ of June 12th, in which the author's philosophic
outlook is condemned as a dangerous compound of Schopenhauer, Comte, and
Shelley. It is somewhat doubtful if he ever made more for a book than the
L250 he got for _New Grub Street_. L200, we believe, was advanced on _The
Nether World,_ but this proved anything but a prosperous speculation from
the publisher's point of view, and L150 was refused for _Born in Exile_.]

To the Ercles vein of these Titans of fiction, Gissing was a complete
stranger. To the pale and fastidious recluse and anchorite, their tone of
genial remonstrance with the world and its ways was totally alien. He knew
nothing of the world to start with beyond the den of the student. His
second book, as he himself described it in the preface to a second edition,
was the work of a very young man who dealt in a romantic spirit with the
gloomier facts of life. Its title, _The Unclassed,_[3] excited a little
curiosity, but the author was careful to explain that he had not in view
the _declasses_ but rather those persons who live in a limbo external to
society, and refuse the statistic badge. The central figure Osmond Waymark
is of course Gissing himself. Like his creator, raving at intervals under
the vile restraints of Philistine surroundings and with no money for
dissipation, Osmond gives up teaching to pursue the literary vocation. A
girl named Ida Starr idealises him, and is helped thereby to a purer life.
In the four years' interval between this somewhat hurried work and his
still earlier attempt the young author seems to have gone through a
bewildering change of employments. We hear of a clerkship in Liverpool, a
searing experience in America (described with but little deviation in _New
Grub Street_), a gas-fitting episode in Boston, private tutorships, and
cramming engagements in 'the poisonous air of working London.' Internal
evid