erful skill in shadowing forth feminine types of lovelihood.
Suggestive too of his oncoming passion for Devonshire and Western England
are strains of exquisite landscape music scattered at random through these
pages. More significant still, however, is the developing faculty for
personal satire, pointing to a vastly riper human experience. Peak was
uncertain, says the author, with that faint ironical touch which became
almost habitual to him, 'as to the limits of modern latitudinarianism until
he met Chilvers,' the sleek, clerical advocate of 'Less St. Paul and more
Darwin, less of Luther and more of Herbert Spencer':--

'The discovery of such fantastic liberality in a man whom he could not
but dislike and contemn gave him no pleasure, but at least it disposed
him to amusement rather than antagonism. Chilvers's pronunciation and
phraseology were distinguished by such original affectation that it
was impossible not to find entertainment in listening to him. Though
his voice was naturally shrill and piping, he managed to speak in head
notes which had a ring of robust utterance. The sound of his words was
intended to correspond with their virile warmth of meaning. In the
same way he had cultivated a habit of the muscles which conveyed an
impression that he was devoted to athletic sports. His arms
occasionally swung as if brandishing dumb-bells, his chest now and
then spread itself to the uttermost, and his head was often thrown
back in an attitude suggesting self-defence.'

[Footnote 15: See page 260.]

Of Gissing's first year or so at Owens, after leaving Lindow Grove School
at Alderley,[16] we get a few hints in these pages. Like his 'lonely
cerebrate' hero, Gissing himself, at school and college, 'worked insanely.'
Walked much alone, shunned companionship rather than sought it, worked as
he walked, and was marked down as a 'pot-hunter.' He 'worked while he ate,
he cut down his sleep, and for him the penalty came, not in a palpable,
definable illness, but in an abrupt, incongruous reaction and collapse.'
With rage he looked back on these insensate years of study which had
weakened him just when he should have been carefully fortifying his
constitution.

[Footnote 16: With an exhibition gained when he was not yet fifteen.]

The year of this autobiographical record[17] marked the commencement of
Gissing's reclamation from that worst form of literary slavery--the
chain