ABSTRACT
This is not the time to tell the details of that troubled life, of the tragedy which lay behind that arduous literary toil and coloured all the outlook with indignation and pain. Some day, for the edification or the warning ofthe children ofthe future, the full story will be told. All that it is necessary to know at the present is contained in those books in which the author, under the thin veil of fiction, is protesting out of his heart's bitterness against the existence to which he has been committed. 'For twenty years he had lived by the pen. He was a struggling man beset by poverty and other circumstances very unpropitious to work.' 'He did a great deal ofmere hack-work: he reviewed, he translated, he wrote articles. There were times, I have no doubt, when bitterness took hold upon him; not seldom he suffered in health, and probably as much from moral as from physical overstrain.' The tyranny of this nineteenth-century Grub Street drove his genius into a hard and narrow groove. He might have developed into a great critic-witness the promise ofhis essay on Dickens. There was humour in him all unsuspected by the public till the appearance of The Town Traveller. And a keen eye for natural beauty, and a power of description of the charm and fascination of places, and a passionate love of nature and ofhome were only made manifest in By the Ionian Sea, and the last and most kindly volume.
