wheels grind so slowly, though they "grind exceeding small."

posed ours to have been, it is not often cured by a little sputter of fighting; nor does the belief in the efficacy of such a Between" Alton Locke" and "Two remedy seem to fit in very well with a Years Ago" there luckily intervened spiritual Christianity. Perhaps we may "Hypatia" and "Westward Ho!" They further assume, therefore, that the change are brilliant and almost solitary exceptions was partly in Kingsley himself. If so, he to the general dreariness of the historical was not the first man to account for an novel. To criticise them either from the alteration in his personal outlook by a historical or the artistic point of view movement of the rest of the universe. would indeed be easy enough; but they His parish had been got into better order; have a vivacity which defies criticism. I his combative instinct had grown weaker; have no doubt that "Hypatia" is fundaand, like other men who grow in years and mentally and hopelessly inaccurate, and domestic comfort, he had become more that a sound historian would shudder at content with things in general. Fathers innumerable anachronisms and pick holes of families are capable, we know, of every-in every paragraph. I don't believe that thing, and amongst other things, of soften- men like the Goths ever existed in this ing the fervor of their early enthusiasms. world, and am prepared to give up the There is nothing at all strange in the whole tribe of monks, pagans, Jews, and process; but it must be taken to illustrate fathers of the Church. If "Westward the fact that, if Kingsley's sympathies were Ho!" is (as I presume) less inaccurate bekeen, his intellectual insight was not very cause dealing with less distant ages, it is deep. A man who holds that a social dis- still too much of a party pamphlet to be ease is so easily suppressed has not meas- taken for history. The Jesuits are probured very accurately the constitutional ably caricatures, and Miss Ayacanora is a disorder which it revealed. bit of rather silly melodrama. But it is difficult to say too much in favor of the singular animation and movement of both books. There is a want of repose, if you insist upon applying the highest canons of art; but the brilliance of description, the energy and rapidity of the action, simply disarms the reader. I rejoice in the Amal and Wulf and Raphael Aben Ezra, as I love Ivanhoe, and Front de Boeuf, and Wamba the Witless. The fight between " English mastiffs and Spanish bloodhounds" is almost as stirring as the skirmish of Drumclog in "Old Mortality." "Hypatia," according to Kingsley himself, was written with his heart's blood. Like other phrases of his, that requires a little dilution. But, at any rate, both books stand out for vividness, for a happy audacity and quickness of percep tion, above all modern attempts in the same direction.

"Two Years Ago," the book in which this conclusion is plainly announced, is in some respects a painful performance. It contains, indeed, some admirable descriptions of scenery; but the sentiment is poor and fretful. Tom Thurnall, intended to be an embodiment of masculine vigor, has no real stuff in him. He is a brag ging, excitable, and at bottom sentimental person. All his swagger fails to convince us that he is a true man. Put beside a really simple and masculine nature like Dandie Dinmont, or even beside Kingsley's own Amyas Leigh, one sees his hollowness. The whole story leads up to a distribution of poetical justice in Kingsley's worst manner. He has a lamentable weakness for taking upon himself the part of Providence. After all," he once wrote in "Yeast," "your Rake's Progress' and 'Atheist's Deathbed' do no more good than noble George Cruikshank's Bottle' will, because every one knows that they are the exception and not the rule; that the atheist generally dies with a conscience as comfortably callous as a rhinoceros-hide: and the rake, when age stops his power of sinning, becomes generally rather more respectable than his neighbors." It is a pity that Kingsley could not remember this true saying in later years. He seems to have grown too impatient to leave room for the natural evolution of events. He gives the machinery a jerk and is fidgety because the

The problems discussed in these historical novels and the solutions suggested are of course substantially the same as in his earlier books. The period of " Hypatia" bears a striking analogy to the present. In the heroes described in "Westward Ho!" he supposed himself to recognize the fullest realization of the fundamental doctrines of his own creed. Much might be said, were it worth saying, as to the accuracy of these assumptions. Kingsley's method is in any case too much tainted by the obvious tendency to see facts by the light of preconceived theories.

In the earlier writings he may be one- | lands. One secret is of course the terseness sided and exaggerated; but his imagina- and directness of his descriptions. He tion is at least guided by reference to never lays himself out for a bit of deliberactual observation. It seems as if in this ate bombast, and deals always with firstlater period he had instinctively turned hand impressions. The writing is all away to distant periods where men and alive. There is no dead matter of convenevents might be more easily moulded into tional phrases and imitative ecstasies. conformity with his prejudices. However And again, his descriptions are always skilful a man may be in accommodating fact to fancy, he is apt to find difficulties when he paints from the life around him. But when nobody can contradict you except a few prosaic antiquarians, the outside world becomes delightfully malleable. You do not find any fragments of rigid material in the clay which shapes itself so easily in your fingers. Kingsley has faith enough in his teaching to give a genuine glow to these hybrid beings begotten half of fancy half of the external world. But we feel too plainly that the work will not stand the test of close examination, either by the historian or the literary critic. Such a nemesis naturally overtakes men who admit too easily an appeal from fact to sentiment. They begin to lose the sense of reality, and their artistic work shows signs of flimsiness as their theories of arbitrary assumption. The great writer pierces to the true life of a period because he recognizes the necessity of conforming his beliefs to realities. The inferior writer uses his knowledge only to give coloring to his dreams, and his work tries to represent what he would like to be the truth instead of showing genuine insight into what is actually true.

dramatic. There is a human being in the foreground with whom we sympathize. We do not lose ourselves in mystic meditations, we surrender ourselves to mere sensuous dreaming. We are in active, strenuous enjoyment; beguiling the trout of his favorite chalk-streams, sailing under the storm-beaten cliffs of Lundy, and drinking in the rich sea-breeze that sweeps over Dartmoor, or galloping with clenched teeth through the fir-woods of Eversley. One characteristic picture to take one at random from a thousand — is the homeward ride of Zeal-for-Truth Thoresby of Thoresby Rise in Deeping Fen as he rides slowly homeward after Naseby fight along one of the fen-droves. One could swear that one had been with him, as Kingsley no doubt was merely embodying the vivid recollection of some old Cambridge expedition into the Bedford Level, a scenery which has a singular and mysterious charm, though few besides Kingsley have succeeded in putting it on paper.

Some wonder has been wasted on Kingsley's descriptions of the tropical scenery which he had never seen. Even men of genius do not work miracles; and so far as I know, they always blunder in such Whatever else in Kingsley may have attempts. Johnson showed his usual sense been affected or half-hearted, his appreci- in regard to a similar criticism upon the ation of nature remained true and healthy blind poet, Blacklock. If, he said, you to the end. If anything it became more found that a paralytic man had left his intense as he seemed to grow weary of room, you would explain the wonder by abstract discussions and turned for relief supposing that he had been carried. Simi to natural scenes. Nobody has ever shown larly, the explanation of Kingsley and of a greater power of investing with a roman- Blacklock is that they described not what tic charm the descriptions of bird, beast, they had seen but what they had read. and insect. There are no more delightful The description in " Westward Ho!" may books than those which express the nat- easily be traced to Humboldt and other uralist's delight in country sights, from the sources where they are not explicable by a days of Izaak Walton to White of Sel- visit to Kew Gardens. A minute criticism borne, or Waterton, or our most recent would show that they are little more than discovery, the Scotch naturalist Edward. catalogues of gorgeous plants and strange Amongst such writers, Kingsley is in the beasts; and show none of those vivid front rank; and his taste is combined with touches, so striking from their fidelity, a power of catching wider aspects of scen- which give animation to his descriptions ery, such as few of our professional de- of English scenery. In his pictures of scribers can unravel. It would be inter- Devonshire we can tell the time of the day esting to lay bare the secret of his power. and night and the state of the weather as He has done for Devon and Cornwall, for clearly as if he were a meteorologist. In the heaths and chalk-streams of the south-South America he leaves us to generalities. ern counties, and even for the much depre- The true secret of his success is different. ciated fens, what Scott did for the High- He describes vividly not the outward fact, VOL. XVIII. 916

LIVING AGE.

he had scented the corpses beneath the surge. Below them, from the gull-rock rose a thousand birds, and filled the air with sound; the choughs cackled, the hacklets wailed, the great black-backs laughed querulous defiance at the intruders, and a single falcon, with an angry bark, darted out from beneath their feet, and hung poised high aloft, watching the sea-fowl which swung slowly round and round below." That gives the atmospheric effect, and what we may call the dramatic character. Every phrase suggests a picture, and the whole description, of which I have quoted a bit, has real unity of effect, instead of being a simple enumeration of details.

but the inward enjoyment. One need not | sank down the abysses of the cliff, as if go to the tropics to imagine the charm of luxurious indolence. Perhaps we enjoy it the more because we have not really been exposed to its inconveniences. The dazzling of the eye by blazing sunlight and brilliant colors, the relief given by the cool deep streams under luxuriant foliage, the vague consciousness of wondrous forms of life lurking in the forest depths, can be realized without any special accuracy of portraiture. The contagion to which we are really exposed is that of the enthusiasm with which Kingsley had read his favorite books of travel. But of downright description there is little, and that little not very remarkable. If anybody doubts it he may read the passage of river scenery which concludes with a quotation from Humboldt, and observe how vividly the fragment of actual observation stands out from the mere catalogue of curiosities, or, again, with any of Kingsley's own Devonshire scenes, where every touch shows loving familiarity with details and a consequent power of selecting just the most speaking incidents.

When one reads some passages inspired by this hearty and simple-minded love of nature, one is sometimes half tempted to wish that Kingsley could have put aside his preachings, social, theological, and philosophical, and have been content with a function for which he was so admirably adapted. The men who can feel and make others feel the charms of We may put two passages beside each beautiful scenery and stimulate the love other which will illustrate the difference. for natural history do us a service which, Describing, after Humboldt, the mid-day if not the highest, is perhaps the most calm of the forest, he says, "The birds' unalloyed by any mixture of evil. Kingsnotes died out one by one; the very but-ley would have avoided many errors and terflies ceased their flitting over the tree- the utterance of much unsatisfactory dogtops, and slept with outspread wings upon matism if he could have limited himself the glassy leaves, undistinguishable from to such a duty. But to do so he must the flowers around them. Now and then have been a man of narrower sympathies, a colibri whirred downward towards the less generous temper, and less hearty water, hummed for a moment round some hatred of all evil influences. We could pendent flower, and then the living gem hardly wish him to have been other than was lost in the deep darkness of the inner he was, though we may wish that he had wood, among tree-trunks as huge and dark developed under more favorable circumas the pillars of some Hindoo shrine; or stances. The weaknesses which marred a parrot swung and screamed at them from his work and led to the exhaustion of his an overhanging bough; or a thirsty mon- faculties were to be regretted, but were key slid lazily down a liana to the surface not such as to diminish the affection deof the stream, dipped up the water in his served by so cordial a nature. He is tiny hand, and started chattering back, as more or less responsible for those rather his eyes met those of some foul alligator offensive persons, the viking and the muspeering upward through the clear depths cular Christian. The viking, I suppose, below." This and more is good enough, must have been a humbug like other prodbut there is nothing which would not sug- ucts of graphic history, and too much gest itself to a visitor to the British Mu- has been made of his supposed share in seum or the Zoological Gardens. It is a our ancestry. Kingsley had a feminine catalogue, and rather too full a catalogue, tenderness and an impatient excitability of curiosities, without one of those vivid indicative of a different ancestry. He touches which reveals actual observation. admires the huge, full-blooded barbarians, At the end of the same volume, we have but only belongs to them on one side. He a real sketch from nature. Amyas and is as near to his delicate as to his muscuhis friends walk to the cliffs of Lundy: "As they approached, a raven, who sat upon the topmost stone, black against the bright blue sky, flapped lazily away, and

lar heroes, to Francis as to Amyas Leigh, and to the morbid poet, Vavasour, as to the more vigorous Tom Thurnall. In these days, when the viking or Berserker

element seems to be dying out of our lit- be well content if this beautiful, tendererature, even this qualified and external eyed creature, whose excessive sensitiveworship of muscular vigor is valuable. ness of conscience was, after all, only the There is something hectic and spasmodic result of her ignorance of the world, were about it, though it implies a homage to to wait for him in that sylvan retreat, more healthy ideals. Kingsley, at any ready to receive him and cheer him with rate, hated the namby-pamby, and he tried, the sweet solicitude of her loving ways. with too obvious an effort, to be simple And in the mean time, he would try to and unaffected. His aims were thoroughly make their companionship as pleasant as noble, though marred by his want of re- possible; he would try to make this jourserve and of intellectual stamina. He was ney one to be remembered with pride too timid or too impatient to work out and gratitude. If there were one or two consistent theories or acquire much depth subjects which they avoided in conversaof conviction. But with all his short- tion, what of that? comings he succeeded in giving forcible utterance to truths of vital importance, though possibly requiring more embodiment, and brought vividly before our minds problems which most urgently press for a solution more satisfactory than he was able to reach.

And as soon as Lady Sylvia heard that the Chorleys and Mr. Bolitho had left Mainz, she became more tender and affec tionate than ever towards her husband, and would do anything to meet his wishes. Learning that certain of his. political friends were at the moment at Luzern, she offered to go thither at once, so that he might have something to interest him apart from the monotony of a weddingtrip; and, although, of course, he did not accept the offer, he recognized her intention, and was grateful to her. Was it not enough occupation for him to watch the THE effect on this ingenuous mind of the new wonders that she saw -as they went on to Schaffhausen, and the Tyrol, and Verona, and Venice?

From The Examiner.

GREEN PASTURES AND PICCADILLY.

BY WILLIAM BLACK.

AUTHOR OF THE ADVENTURES OF A PHAETON,'
PRINCESS OF THULE," ETC.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE HOME-COMING.

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Of course they did not quarrel. We live in the nineteenth century. Tolerance of opinion exists in the domestic circle as well as elsewhere; and no reasonable man would like his wife to be that vague and colorless reproduction of her husband which Lady Sylvia, all unknown to Balfour, had striven to be. She ought to have her own convictions; she ought to know how to govern her own conduct; nay, more, he would allow her to do as she pleased. There was but one condition attached. "You shall have your own way in everything," said the man in the story to his wife; "but you can't expect to have my way too." Lady Sylvia was welcome to act as she pleased; but then he reserved the same liberty for himself.

This decision he came to without any bitterness of feeling. He was quite anxious to make all possible excuses for her. Doubtless she preferred Surrey to Piccadilly. It is true he had looked forward to her being a valuable helpmeet to him in his political life; but it was perhaps expecting too much of her that she should at once interest herself in the commonplace incidents of an election. He would

In their hotel at Venice, Balfour ran against a certain Captain Courtenay, with whom he had a slight acquaintance. They had a chat in the evening, in the smokingroom.

"Seen Major Blythe, lately?" said Balfour, among other things.

"No," answered the other, somewhat coldly.

"You don't know, I suppose," asked Balfour, quite unconcernedly, "how that business at the C—— Club came off?”

The young man with the fair moustache eyed him narrowly. It is not a safe thing to tell a man evil things of his relatives, unless you know how they stand with regard to each other.

"Yes, I do know - eh - an unfortunate business very. Fact is, Blythe wouldn't explain. I suppose there was some delay about the posting of that letter; and — and I have no doubt that he would have paid the money next day if he had not been bullied about it. You see, a man does not like to be challenged in that way, supposing he has made a trifling mistake

"Yes," said Balfour, nodding his head in acquiescence; "but how was it settled ?"

Then he went up-stairs to the sittingroom, and found Lady Sylvia at the open casement, looking out on the clear, bluegreen, lambent twilight.

"Well, good wife," said he, gaily, "are you beginning to think of trudging home now? We ought to see a little of the Lilacs before all the leaves are gone. And there won't be much to keep me in London now, I fancy; they are getting more and more certain that the government won't bring on the dissolution before the new year.

She rose, and put a hand on each of his shoulders, and looked up into his face with grateful and loving eyes.

"That is so kind of you, Hugh. It will be so pleasant for us to get to know what home really is after all these hotels! And you will be in time for the pheasants; I know several people will be so glad to have you."

Of course the merest stranger would be delighted to have so distinguished a person as Mr. Balfour come and shoot his pheasants for him; failing that, would she not herself, like a loyal and dutiful wife, go to her few acquaintances down there and represent to them the great honor they might have of entertaining her husband?

She knew nothing whatever about it. But she would have believed her husband if he had told her that St. Mark's was made of green cheese.

"I mean that it is unwise," said he without any enthusiasm. “Christ meant his Church to be the Church of the poor. The rich man has a bad time of it in the gospels. And you may depend on it that if you produce among the poorer classes the feeling that the Church of England is

on the side of the rich is the natural ally of the squires, landlords, and other employers - you are driving them into the hands of the Dissenters, and hastening on disestablishment."

"And serve them right, too," said she, boldly, "if they betray their trust. When the Church ceases to be of the nation, let it cease to be the national Church!"

This was a pretty speech. How many weeks before was it that Lady Sylvia was vowing to uphold her beloved Church against all comers, but more especially against a certain malignant iconoclast of the name of Mrs. Chorley? And now she was not only ready to assume that one or two random and incautious speeches represented the opinion of the whole of the clergymen of England, but she was also ready to have the connection between Church and State severed in order to punish those recusants.

But,

"I am not sure," said Balfour, apparently taking no notice of this sudden recantation, "that something of that feeling has not been produced already. The working-man of the towns jeers at the parson. The agricultural laborer distrusts him; and will grow to hate him if he takes the landlord's side in this matter. Now, why does not the Archbishop of Canterbury seize the occasion? Why does he "I see there is to be a demonstration not come forward and say: "Hold a bit, on the part of the agricultural laborers,” | my friends. Your claims may be just; or said he," down in Somersetshire. I should they may be exorbitant: that is a matter like to see that—I should like to have a for careful inquiry; and you must let your talk with some of their leaders. But I landlords be heard on the other side. am afraid we could not get back in time." whatever happens, don't run away with the "My darling," she protested, seriously, notion that the Church has no sympathy "I can start at five minutes' notice. We with you; that the Church is the ally of can go to-night, if you wish!" your landlord; that it is the interest of your parson to keep you poor, ill-fed, illlodged, and ignorant. On the contrary, who knows so much about your circumstances? Who more fitting to become the mediator between you and your landlord? You may prefer to have leaders from your own ranks to fight your battles for you; but don't imagine that the parson looks on unconcerned, and above all don't expect to find him in league with your

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"Oh no, it isn't worth while," said he, absently. And then he continued: "I'm afraid your friends, the clergymen, are making a mistake as regards that question. I don't know who these leaders are; I should like to know more precisely their character and aims; but it will do no good to call them agitators, and suggest that they should be ducked in horse-ponds-" "It is infamous!" said Lady Sylvia.