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
