LITERARY STRUGGLES. 155 



Edmund Gibbon under similar circumstances. She sighed 

 as a lover, but she obeyed as a daughter. 



It was no time, however, for Philip Gosse to be dallying 

 with the tender passion. His fortunes were at their lowest 

 ebb, and the summer of 1839 marks the darkest point of 

 his whole career. It was a happy thought that made him 

 turn, at last, to what should long ago have engrossed his 

 attention, the field of literature. In the fervid and unwhole- 

 some condition of his mind, he had set on one side the 

 manuscript of his Canadian Naturalist. It was only by a 

 fortunate accident that, in his full tide of Puritanism, he had 

 not destroyed it. It was now his one and only chance for 

 the future, and London was the sole field into which he 

 could, with hope of a harvest, drop the solitary seed. A 

 constitutional timidity and that fear of London which is 

 sometimes so strong in a sensitive countryman, held him 

 shivering on the brink. At last, on June 7, 1839, he set 

 out on a coach for the metropolis. While he had been 

 in Dorsetshire he had earned just enough to prevent his 

 being a positive burden upon his people, partly by preach- 

 ing for absent ministers, partly by teaching the elements of 

 flower-painting. He thought to continue the second branch 

 as a lucrative profession in London, his own drawings 

 being, as his Canadian and Alabaman specimens showed, 

 of an exquisite merit. But his ignorance of London and of 

 life were quite extraordinary. His first lodging in the 

 town was quaintly chosen, since, in consequence of some 

 literary reminiscence or another, he selected Drury Lane 

 as the scene of his operations, and took a cheap but 

 infinitely sordid lodging on the east side of that noisy 

 and malodorous street. His room was an attic, a few 

 doors north of Great Queen Street, and the present writer 

 vividly remembers how, in his own boyhood, his father, 

 walking briskly towards the British Museum with Charles 



