By George E. Dartnell. 75 



like many other projects of his, this came to nothing. So late as 

 November, 1875, he writes that the second volume "is begun, and 

 shall be finished." 



The following year he wrote several articles on agricultural life, 

 and planned out a great work on the same theme, much of which 

 was eventually worked up into Hodge and his Masters. Of these 

 scattered articles those on Field-faring Women and Marlborough 

 Forest are the best. In them his style is already matured. About 

 the two pamphlets which belong to the same period, Jack Brass 

 and SuEZ-ciDE, we know nothing, but they were probably of little 

 value. Between 1874 and 1877 he did an immense amount of work, 

 of which the greater part appears to have gone from publisher to 

 publisher, till at last it found a resting-place in his waste-paper 

 basket. He also published three trashy novels, The Scarlet Shawl, 

 Restless Human Hearts, and World's End, and wrote The 

 Dewy Morn, which however was not published until seven years 

 later, Greene Ferne Farm probably also belongs to this period. 

 All of them are failures, the characters being mere puppets, the 

 plots poor and forced, and the execution generally crude and coarse. 

 He knew absolutely nothing of the life that he attempted to depict 

 in them, and there is very seldom a passage that one would care to 

 quote as at all characteristic of him. 



Up to this time he had produced, or to speak more precisely, had 

 published, very little work of importance. A volume of a hundred 

 pages would probably contain all that was of any real value. But 

 now a great change was at hand. In 1877 he moved to the neigh- 

 bourhood of London, and from thenceforth gave himself up almost 

 entirely to the work for which his genius was best fitted. The 

 following year saw the first of that wonderful series of books on 

 country life, to which we turn with ever-renewed pleasure. Taking 

 them as a whole, no better work of the kind has ever been done, 

 and it will be long before the world sees their equal again. Others, 

 as we have already said, could on occasion surpass him, but then 

 their flights were shorter and less sustained. 



Five of these volumes followed in quick succession, and as many 

 more after a short interval. The Saturday Revieio, with its usual 



