The intellectual beauty and sincere friendliness of Gissing's nature were obscured by a peculiar pride or sensitiveness. His idiosyncrasies wore down as he grew older, but he lost also his extraordinary power of intensifying the misery of the world's finer spirits who are thrown among 'the herd that feed and breed' and are stupidly contented. His prose style is scholarly, suave, subtle, and plastic. Critics have deemed him a classicist who missed his vocation, but few classicists have written so much or so well. His imperfect understanding of the joie de vivre reduced his public while he lived; but there are signs that his work is obtaining a better co-ordinated appreciation since his death.
In addition to the works already enumerated Gissing wrote : 1. 'The Paying Guest,' 1895. 2. 'Sleeping Fires,' 1895. 3. 'Human Odds and Ends' (stories), 1898. 4. 'The Crown of Life' (early chapters semi-autobiog.), 1899. 5. 'The House of Cobwebs, and other Stories' (with an introductory survey of Gissing's books by the present writer), 1906.
A portrait appears in William Rothenstein's 'English Portraits' (1898), reduced in later (pocket) editions of the popular 'Ryecroft Papers.' A drawing by Mr. H. G. Wells is reproduced in the 'New York Critic' The MSS. of Gissing's novels passed to his brother Algernon.
[The Times, 29 Dec. 1903; Guardian, 6 Jan. 1904; Outlook, 2 Jan. 1904; Sphere, 9 Jan. 1904 (portrait); Athenæum, 2 and 16 Jan. 1904, 7 July 1906; Academy, 9 and 16 Jan. 1904; New York Nation, 11 June 1903; Independent Rev., Feb. 1904; New York Critic, June 1902; Bookman, July 1906; Albany, Christmas No., 1904; Monthly Rev. vol. xvi.; Murray's Mag. iii. 506–18; National Rev., Oct. 1897, Nov. 1904, Nov. 1906; Saturday Rev., 19 Jan. 1895 and 13 April 1896; Gent. Mag., Feb. 1906; C. F. G. Masterman's In Peril of Change, 1905, pp. 68-73; Atlantic Monthly, xciii. 280; Upton Letters, 1905, p. 206; English Illustrated Rev., Nov. 1903; Nineteenth Cent., Sept. 1906; Fortnightly Rev., Feb. 1904; Manchester Guardian, 23 May 1906; Evening News, 18 June 1906; Manchester University Mag., May 1910; George Gissing, an Impression, by H. G. Wells, originally written as introduction to Veranilda; private information.]
GLADSTONE, JOHN HALL (1827–1902), chemist, born at 7 Chatham Place West, Hackney, London, on 7 March 1827, was the eldest son of John Gladstone by his wife Alison Hall. The second son, George (1828–1909), a prominent educationalist, was for many years chairman of the School Board of Hove, Sussex. The father came from Kelso, where the family had been established since 1645, and after a successful career as a wholesale draper and warehouseman retired from business in 1842. John, after being privately educated, entered in 1844 University College, London, and attended the chemistry lectures of Professor Thomas Graham [q. v.], gaining a gold medal for original research, and publishing a paper on guncotton and xyloidine. In 1847 he went to Giessen University, where he was a pupil of Liebig, and after graduating Ph.D. there he returned to London in 1848. From 1850 to 1852 he was lecturer on chemistry at St. Thomas's Hospital, and in 1853 he was elected F.R.S. He sat on the royal commission which inquired into lighthouses, buoys and beacons from 1859 to 1862, and on the committee which the war office appointed in 1864 to investigate questions regarding guncotton. He succeeded Michael Faraday [q. v.] as Fullerian professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution in 1874, but resigned in 1877. Amongst the other important offices he held in scientific societies were president of the Physical Society (1874), of which he was a founder, and of the Chemical Society (1877–9); in 1892 he was made an honorary D.Sc. of Trinity College, Dublin, on the occasion of its tercentenary celebrations, and in 1897 he received the Davy medal from the Royal Society.
Gladstone was one of the founders of the new science of physical chemistry. A long series of papers — Professor Tilden estimates them at 140 by himself alone, and seventy-eight in collaboration — contributed to various learned societies through life contains the record of his researches. In his earlier years his chief discoveries concerned chemistry in relation to optics, and the refraction and the dispersion of liquids. He was one of the earliest students in spectroscopy, and published several papers, one written with Sir David Brewster, on the 'Solar Spectrum.' In 1872, with his assistant Alfred Tribe, he discovered that zinc covered with spongy copper would decompose water, and from that time the copper-zinc couple has become one of the most familiar pieces of chemico-electrical apparatus. The discovery was immediately followed by experiments as to the value of the copper-zinc union as a reducing agent for both organic and inorganic compounds. The results
