Once he made an effort at combining tragic romance with this latter kind in _Macleod of Dare_ (1878), but, though this was nearer to a success than some of his critics admitted, it was not quite a success: and though he wrote fully a score of novels after it, he never came nearer the actual bull's eye.
In fact his later work was not up to a very good average.
Neither of these writers, except, as has been said, perhaps Black in his 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.