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.']

The main plot of _Demos_ is concerned with Richard Mutimer, a young
socialist whose vital force, both mental and physical, is well above the
average, corrupted by accession to a fortune, marrying a refined wife,
losing his money in consequence of the discovery of an unsuspected will,
and dragging his wife down with him,--down to _la misere_ in its most
brutal and humiliating shape. Happy endings and the Gissing of this period
are so ill-assorted, that the 'reconciliations' at the close of both this
novel and the next are to be regarded with considerable suspicion. The
'gentlefolk' in the book are the merest marionettes, but there are
descriptive passages of first-rate vigour, and the voice of wisdom is heard
from the lips of an early Greek choregus in the figure of an old parson
called Mr. Wyvern. As the mouthpiece of his creator's pet hobbies parson
Wyvern rolls out long homilies conceived in the spirit of Emerson's
'compensation,' and denounces the cruelty of educating the poor and making
no after-provision for their intellectual needs with a sombre enthusiasm
and a periodicity of style almost worthy of Dr. Johnson.[11]

[Footnote 11: An impressive specimen of his eloquence was cited by me in an
article in the _Daily Mail Year Book_ (1906, p. 2). A riper study of a
somewhat similar character is given in old Mr. Lashmar in _Our Friend the
Charlatan_. (See his sermon on the blasphemy which would have us pretend
that our civilisation obeys the spirit of Christianity, in chap, xviii.).
For a criticism of _Demos_ and _Thyrza_ in juxtaposition with Besant's
_Children of Gibeon_, see Miss Sichel on 'Philanthropic Novelists'
(_Murray's Magazine_, iii. 506-518). Gissing saw deeper than to 'cease his
music on a merry chord.']

After _Demos_, Gissing returned in 1888 to the more sentimental and
idealistic palette which he had employed for