ABSTRACT
In Gossip in a Library, Gosse reprinted a series of articles originally published in the Saturday Review, St James’s Gazette, Black and White, and the Independent (New York). The articles were either ‘retrospective reviews’ of books Gosse possessed ‘which seem less known in detail to modern readers than they should be’, or cases ‘where personal history of a well-known book seems worth detaching from our critical estimate of it’. His article on Donne, titled ‘Death’s Duel’, is an account of Donne’s last days and his final sermon before James I, on the text of the words from the sixty-eighth psalm: ‘And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death.’ This was subsequently published as Death’s Duel, with a reproduction of the upper part of the painting of Donne wrapped in a winding sheet as frontispiece (Gossip in a Library, 1891, pp. 55-64).
