ABSTRACT
Isabel Clarendon by George Gissing, is as much like The Basilisk as The Mysteries of Udolpho is like the Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Mr Gissing is evidently a great admirer ofthe greatest ofour living novelists, but George Meredith is not a writer who permits of imitation, his wit is too incisive, his imagination too subtle. Yet Mr Gissing has succeeded in writing a most excellent story and in sketching a man of the type of Kingcote, given as a careful study of an abnormal psychologic development. The man whose extreme sensitiveness has rendered him utterly indolent can never be a pleasing person, but he is scientifically accurate. Debarred from joining in what the world calls its pleasures, they yet receive full heritage of its misfortunes. That Kingcote should have fallen in love with a woman like Isabel Clarendon, who is a perfect woman, but a woman of society all the same, is only natural, and that he should have afterwards found that she was quite incapable of appreciating his passion of feeling for his agonies is equally true to that phase of mental growth which Mr Gissing has laid himself out to follow. Isabel Clarendon I have called a perfect woman. She is lovable, queen-like, and beautiful, but she is weak, the creature of her environment, and when she meets Kingcote, though
