intense interest in both natural history and the well-being of his son. Gosse's second marriage was as happy as his first. In 1862 he wrote that Eliza was "a true yoke-fellow, in love, in spirit and in service." By this time Gosse was "very comfortably off" with the earnings from his books and dividends from his investments. In 1864 Eliza received a substantial legacy that allowed Gosse to retire from his career as a professional writer and live in "congenial obscurity". The Gosses lived simply, invested some of their income and gave more away to charity, especially to foreign missionaries, including ones sent to the "Popish, priest-ridden Irish". To Gosse's great grief, his son rejected Christianity—though almost certainly not as early or as dramatically as Edmund portrayed the break in Father and Son. But Gosse sponsored the publication of Edmund's early poetry, which gave the younger man entrée to new friends of literary importance, and the two men "came out of the years of conflict with their relationship wary but intact." Henry and Eliza welcomed Edmund's wife to the family and enjoyed visits with their three grandchildren. Meanwhile, the ever active Gosse had taken up the study of orchids and exchanged a number of letters on the subject with Darwin, though he never published on this subject himself. His penultimate enthusiasm was with the genitalia of butterflies, about which he published a paper in the Transactions of the Linnean Society But before his death he returned to rotifera, with much of his research appearing in a two-volume study written with another zoologist, Charles Thomas Hudson. His wife recalled that Gosse's final illness may have been caused by his becoming chilled while trying to adjust his telescope at an open window on a winter night. Gosse had prayed regularly that he might not taste death but meet Christ in the air at his Second Coming, and he was bitterly disappointed when he realized that he would die like everyone else. Father and Son After his father's death, Edmund Gosse published a typical Victorian biography, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890). After reading it, the writer George Moore suggested to Edmund that it contained "the germ of a great book." Edmund Gosse revised his material and first published his notable memoir anonymously as Father and Son in 1907. It has never gone out of print. The reaction of readers to Henry's