' Of these classes it is possible that he knew less, and
consequently lacked the sureness of touch and the fresh draughtsmanship
which comes from ample knowledge, and that he had, consequently, to have
increasing resort to books and to invention, to hypothesis and theory.[19]
On the other hand, his power of satirical writing was continually expanding
and developing, and some of his very best prose is contained in four of
these later books: _In the Year of Jubilee_ (1894), _Charles Dickens_
(1898), _By the Ionian Sea_ (1901), and _The Private Papers of Henry
Ryecroft_ (1903); not far below any of which must be rated four others,
_The Odd Women_ (1893), _Eve's Ransom_ (1895), _The Whirlpool_ (1897), and
_Will Warburton_ (1905), to which may be added the two collections of short
stories.
[Footnote 17: Followed in 1897 by _The Whirlpool_ (see p. xvi), and in 1899
and 1903 by two books containing a like infusion of autobiographical
experience, _The Crown of Life_, technically admirable in chosen passages,
but sadly lacking in the freshness of first-hand, and _The Private Papers
of Henry Ryecroft_, one of the rightest and ripest of all his productions.]
[Footnote 18: 'I hardly knew what it was to travel by omnibus.
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