earliest stage, had taken novel-writing very seriously: it was otherwise
with the third of the trio. Mr., afterwards Sir Walter, Besant did not
begin early, owing to the fact that, for nearly a decade after leaving
Cambridge, he was a schoolmaster in Mauritius. But he had, in this time,
acquired a greater knowledge of literature than either of the other two
possessed: and when he came home, and took to fiction, he accompanied it
with, or rather based it upon, not merely wide historical studies, which
are still bearing fruit in a series of posthumous dealings with the
history of London, but rather minute observation of the lower social
life of the metropolis. For some ten years his novel production was
carried on, in a rather incomprehensible system of collaboration, with
James Rice, a Cambridge man like himself and a historian of the turf,
but one to whom no independent work in fiction is attributed, except an
incredibly feeble adaptation of _Mr. Verdant Green_, entitled _The
Cambridge Freshman_ and signed "Martin Legrand." During the seventies,
and for a year or two later, till Rice's death in 1882, the pair
provided along series of novels from _Ready-Money Mortiboy_ (1871) to
_The Chaplain of the Fleet_ (1881), the most popular book between being,
perhaps, _The Golden Butterfly_ (1876). These belonged, loosely, to the
school of Dickens, as that school had been carried on by Wilkie Collins
(_v. inf._), but with less grotesque than the original master, and less
"sensation" than the head pupil; with a good deal of solid knowledge
both of older and more modern life; with fairly substantial plots, good
character-drawing of the more external kind, and a sufficient supply of
interesting incident, dialogue, and description.

It was certain that people would affect to discover a "falling off" when
the partnership was dissolved by Rice's death: but as a matter of fact
there was nothing of the kind. Such books as the very good and original
_Revolt of Man_ (which certainly owed nothing to collaboration), as _All