ise and half of regret for the vanishing
England, passing so rapidly even as he writes into 'a new England which
tries so hard to be unlike the old.' A deeper and richer note of
thankfulness, mixed as it must be with anxiety, for the good old ways of
English life (as lamented by Mr. Poorgrass and Mark Clark[25]), old English
simplicity, and old English fare--the fine prodigality of the English
platter, has never been raised. God grant that the leaven may work! And
thirdly there is a deeply brooding strain of saddening yet softened
autobiographical reminiscence, over which is thrown a light veil of
literary appreciation and topical comment. Here is a typical _cadenza_,
rising to a swell at one point (suggestive for the moment of Raleigh's
famous apostrophe), and then most gently falling, in a manner not wholly
unworthy, I venture to think, of Webster and Sir Thomas Browne, of both of
which authors there is internal evidence that Gissing made some study.

[Footnote 24: 'I love and honour even the least of English landscape
painters.'--_Ryecroft_.]

[Footnote 25: 'But what with the parsons and clerks and school-people and
serious tea-parties, the merry old ways of good life have gone to the
dogs--upon my carcass, they have!'--_Far from the Madding Crowd_.]

'I always turn out of my way to walk through a country churchyard;
these rural resting-places are as attractive to me as a town cemetery
is repugnant. I read the names upon the stones and find a deep solace
in thinking that for all these the fret and the fear of life are over.
There comes to me no touch of sadness; whether it be a little child or
an aged man, I have the same sense of happy accomplishment; the end
having come, and with it the eternal peace, what matter if it came
late or soon? There is no such gratulation as _Hic jacet_. There
is no such dignity as that of death. In the path trodden by the
noblest of mankind these have followed; that which of all who live is
the utmost thing demanded, these have achieved. I cannot sorrow for
them, but the thought of their vanished life moves me to a brotherly
tenderness. The dead amid this leafy silence seem to whisper
encouragement to him whose fate yet lingers: As we are, so shalt thou
be; and behold our quiet!'--(p. 183.)

And in this deeply moving and beautiful passage we get a foretaste, it may
be, of the euthanasia, following a brief summer of St. Martin