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 under the charter of Charles II. to that town. This was annulled in 1688, since which time there is no evidence of the election of bailiffs. With this exception no charter of incorporation is known, although by the 16th century the inhabitants held common property in the shape of tolls of the ferry. The importance of Gosport increased during the 16th and 17th centuries owing to its position at the mouth of Portsmouth harbour, and its convenience as a victualling station. For this reason also the town was particularly prosperous during the American and Peninsular Wars. About 1540 fortifications were built there for the defence of the harbour, and in the 17th century it was a garrison town under a lord-lieutenant.

GOSS, SIR JOHN (1800–1880), English composer, was born at Fareham, Hampshire, on the 27th of December 1800. He was elected a chorister of the Chapel Royal in 1811, and in 1816, on the breaking of his voice, became a pupil of Attwood. A few early compositions, some for the theatre, exist, and some glees were published before 1825. He was appointed organist of St Luke’s, Chelsea, in 1824, and in 1838 became organist of St Paul’s in succession to Attwood; he kept the post until 1872, when he resigned and was knighted. His position in the London musical world of the time was an influential one, and he did much by his teaching and criticism to encourage the study and appreciation of good music. In 1876 he was given the degree of Mus.D. at Cambridge. Though his few orchestral works have very small importance, his church music includes some fine compositions, such as the anthems “O taste and see,” “O Saviour of the world” and others. He was the last of the great English school of church composers who devoted themselves almost exclusively to church music; and in the history of the glee his is an honoured name, if only on account of his finest work in that form, the five-part glee, Ossian’s “Hymn to the sun.” He died at Brixton, London, on the 10th of May 1880.

GOSSAMER, a fine, thread like and filmy substance spun by small spiders, which is seen covering stubble fields and gorse bushes, and floating in the air in clear weather; especially in the autumn. By transference anything light, unsubstantial or flimsy is known as “gossamer.” A thin gauzy material used for trimming and millinery, resembling the “chiffon” of to-day, was formerly known as gossamer; and in the early Victorian period it was a term used in the hat trade, for silk hats of very light weight.

The word is obscure in origin, it is found in numerous forms in English, and is apparently taken from gose, goose and somere, summer. The Germans have Mädchensommer, maidens’ summer, and Altweibersommer, old women’s summer, as well as Sommerfäden, summer-threads, as equivalent to the English gossamer, the connexion apparently being that gossamer is seen most frequently in the warm days of late autumn (St Martin’s summer) when geese are also in season. Another suggestion is that the word is a corruption of gaze à Marie (gauze of Mary) through the legend that gossamer was originally the threads which fell away from the Virgin’s shroud on her assumption.

GOSSE, EDMUND (1849– ), English poet and critic, was born in London on the 21st of September 1849, son of the zoologist P. H. Gosse. In 1867 he became an assistant in the department of printed books in the British Museum, where he remained until he became in 1875 translator to the Board of Trade. In 1904 he was appointed librarian to the House of Lords. In 1884–1890 he was Clark Lecturer in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. Himself a writer of literary verse of much grace, and master of a prose style admirably expressive of a wide and appreciative culture, he was conspicuous for his valuable work in bringing foreign literature home to English readers. Northern Studies (1879), a collection of essays on the literature of Holland and Scandinavia, was the outcome of a prolonged visit to those countries, and was followed by later work in the same direction. He translated Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891), and, with W. Archer, The Master-Builder (1893), and in 1907 he wrote a life of Ibsen for the “Literary Lives” series. He also edited the English translation of the works of Björnson.

His services to Scandinavian letters were acknowledged in 1901, when he was made a knight of the Norwegian order of St Olaf of the first class. Mr Gosse’s published volumes of verse include On Viol and Flute (1873), King Erik (1876), New Poems (1879), Firdausi in Exile (1885), In Russet and Silver (1894), Collected Poems (1896). Hypolympia, or the Gods on the Island (1901), an “ironic phantasy,” the scene of which is laid in the 20th century, though the personages are Greek gods, is written in prose, with some blank verse. His Seventeenth Century Studies (1883), Life of William Congreve (1888), The Jacobean Poets (1894), Life and Letters of Dr John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s (1899), Jeremy Taylor (1904, “English Men of Letters”), and Life of Sir Thomas Browne (1905) form a very considerable body of critical work on the English 17th-century writers. He also wrote a life of Thomas Gray, whose works he edited (4 vols., 1884); A History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1889); a History of Modern English Literature (1897), and vols. iii. and iv. of an Illustrated Record of English Literature (1903–1904) undertaken in connexion with Dr Richard Garnett. Mr Gosse was always a sympathetic student of the younger school of French and Belgian writers, some of his papers on the subject being collected as French Profiles (1905). Critical Kit-Kats (1896) contains an admirable criticism of J. M. de Heredia, reminiscences of Lord de Tabley and others. He edited Heinemann’s series of “Literature of the World” and the same publisher’s “International Library.” To the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica he contributed numerous articles, and his services as chief literary adviser in the preparation of the 10th and 11th editions incidentally testify to the high position held by him in the contemporary world of letters. In 1905 he was entertained in Paris by the leading littérateurs as a representative of English literary culture. In 1907 Mr Gosse published anonymously Father and Son, an intimate study of his own early family life. He married Ellen, daughter of Dr G. W. Epps, and had a son and two daughters.

GOSSE, PHILIP HENRY (1810–1888), English naturalist, was born at Worcester on the 6th of April 1810, his father, Thomas Gosse (1765–1844) being a miniature painter. In his youth the family settled at Poole, where Gosse’s turn for natural history was noticed and encouraged by his aunt, Mrs Bell, the mother of the zoologist, Thomas Bell (1792–1880). He had, however, little opportunity for developing it until, in 1827, he found himself clerk in a whaler’s office at Carbonear, in Newfoundland, where he beguiled the tedium of his life by observations, chiefly with the microscope. After a brief and unsuccessful interlude of farming in Canada, during which he wrote an unpublished work on the entomology of Newfoundland, he travelled in the United States, was received and noticed by men of science, was employed as a teacher for some time in Alabama, and returned to England in 1839. His Canadian Naturalist (1840), written on the voyage home, was followed in 1843 by his Introduction to Zoology. His first widely popular book was The Ocean (1844). In 1844 Gosse, who had meanwhile been teaching in London, was sent by the British Museum to collect specimens of natural history in Jamaica. He spent nearly two years on that island, and after his return published his Birds of Jamaica (1847) and his Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica (1851). He also wrote about this time several zoological works for the S.P.C.K., and laboured to such an extent as to impair his health. While recovering at Ilfracombe, he was attracted by the forms of marine life so abundant on that shore, and in 1853 published A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, accompanied by a description of the marine aquarium invented by him, by means of which he succeeded in preserving zoophytes and other marine animals of the humbler grades alive and in good condition away from the sea. This arrangement was more fully set forth and illustrated in his Aquarium (1854), succeeded in 1855–1856 by A Manual of Marine Zoology, in two volumes, illustrated by nearly 700 wood engravings after the author’s drawings. A volume on the marine fauna of Tenby succeeded in 1856. In June of the same year he was elected F.R.S. Gosse, who was a most careful observer, but who