LITERARY WORK IN LONDON. 221 



sion. To Philip Gosse, secure of the sympathetic presence 

 of his wife, there was now no need of entertainment away 

 from home ; but to the new wife the strain of the change 

 was not a small one. Emily Bowes had been of an emi- 

 nently modern temperament — lively, sociable, talkative, 

 accustomed to see moving around her a cloud of female 

 friends. She soon found that visitors were not welcome to 

 her husband, that fresh faces disturbed his ideas and 

 awakened his shyness. His ideal of life was to exist in an 

 even temperature of domestic solitude, absorbed in intel- 

 lectual work, buried in silence. For hours and hours Mrs. 

 Philip had no one to speak to but the servant-maid or her 

 formidable mother-in-law, who, possessing no intellectual 

 resources herself, looked with suspicion on those who did. 

 Emily Gosse's only refuge was in her husband's study, 

 which no one but herself might enter, and where she 

 would sit for hours and hours, fretted by the unwonted 

 restraint, in a silence broken only by the regular whisper 

 of the pen on the paper or of the pencil on the stone. 

 She possessed great command over her feelings, and she 

 was very intelligent and sensible. Before long, she had 

 the approach of other cares and busier interests to occupy 

 her ; but for the time being the strain was very real, the 

 sudden cloistered seclusion from the open world very 

 trying and distressing. She fell back upon her studies, 

 and began in an elegant Italian hand, in the bright blue 

 ink of the period, to annotate an interleaved copy of the 

 Hebrew Bible, which still exists to testify to her industry. 

 On February 1, 1849, the Birds, in the S.P.C.K. series, 

 was published ; and on the 9th of that month the author 

 began the volume called Reptiles. In this same February 

 the Popular British Ornithology was published, and on 

 May 9 Philip Gosse began to write his Text-Book of 

 Zoology for Schools. The composition of this volume 



