LITERARY WORK IN LONDON. 225 



of the rivers mentioned in the Bible, was begun. This 

 was completed early in August, and was instantly suc- 

 ceeded, without a day's interval, by the volume called 

 Fishes, in the S.P.C.K. series. The last three months of 

 the year were occupied in the composition of a work far 

 more important than all these, A Naturalist's Sojourn in 

 Jamaica, which was a record of his stay in that island, 

 mainly printed from the copious manuscript journal which 

 he had preserved. Hitherto he had not known what it 

 was, since his first success, to have a book rejected ; but 

 this, which is certainly in the first rank among his original 

 volumes, was returned to him by Mr. John Murray, only 

 to be accepted, to their ultimate advantage, by Messrs. 

 Longmans. 



The second year of married life was much more com- 

 fortable than the first had been. Mrs. Gosse was occupied 

 by the care of her child, and her husband was neither 

 so self-contained nor so isolated from outer sympathies 

 as he had been. In 1850 he was elected an Associate 

 of the Linnaean Society, and he greatly enjoyed the 

 meetings of this, as of the Microscopical Society. He 

 was taken out of himself by being more and more sought 

 as an authority on zoological matters, and the life of 

 eremitical seclusion which he had chosen to adopt was 

 broken in upon by a variety of human interests. The 

 circumstances of the pair, moreover, were considerably less 

 straitened. His books were not ill paid for, and they 

 had become so numerous that the little sums mounted up. 

 In July, moreover, Mr. and Mrs. Gosse were called down to 

 Leamington to the death-bed of an aunt, who left them a 

 legacy. This was trifling in amount, but the interest of 

 it was enough to form a pleasant increase to an income 

 so small as theirs had been. The pinch of poverty was 

 now relaxed, for the first time in Philip Gosse's life, 



Q 



