in the warfare which he waged he acted as courage, common sense, and refined reason dictated.

But in all this there was much that was opposed to the custom, much which was repugnant to the prejudices, of the clerical world. An outcry was raised against his preaching and teaching, as subversive of the principles of Christianity, as mere heathenism, pagan morality, rationalistic infidelity. A few words or sentences taken away from their context, and twisted and contorted, seemed to confirm such exclusive opinions; and theological dogmatism and hard names with little meaning were hurled at his head by the more ignorant slaves of conventionality and punctilio. And they were not always received too patiently; so far as they affected himself only, Kingsley cared but little, but when they seemed likely to affect his work, to endanger the good that he felt he was doing, he replied, and with a straightforward boldness which has been misunderstood as a loss of temper. But his utterings, though vehement, were certainly not passionate; he probably never penned a line more carefully considered and more thoroughly meant than when, refusing the courtesies of war to an assailant who had anonymously published statements grossly insulting and manifestly untrue, he adapted a quotation from Pascal, and answered in plain words' Mentiris 'impudentissimè '-thou liest most unblushingly; or when he added, Whosoever henceforth, either explicitly or by insinuation, says that I do not hold and believe ex animo, and in the simple and literal sense, all the doctrines of the Catholic and Apostolic Church of England, as embodied in her Liturgy or Articles, shall have no answer from me but Father Valerian's 'Mentiris impudentissimè.'

More direct, honest confession of faith it is impossible for anyone, clergy or layman, to make. To that confession he adhered throughout his life. By the light which this declaration throws on the whole course of his teaching and writing, he must as a clergyman be judged or justified; nor is it to be put on one side or forgotten because he did not deem it necessary to be continually repeating it; though, in point of fact, he did repeat, over and over again, that he will admit of no consciencecheating equivocation; that words, whether in the Gospels or Epistles, or in the Articles of the Church, are to be taken as meaning what they say, and are not to be distorted to suit the wild ideas or doctrinal quibbles of heretics and fanatics. But all this has been ignored, and he has been called a materialist, a rationalist, or what not, because he acted and spoke as a man; because he believed and taught that a priest con

taineth a man, and is a man and something over, viz., his priesthood;' and that if a priest show himself no man, he shows himself all the more no priest.' He would, therefore, have felt shame to shirk any manly duty or manly responsibility lest it should be considered unclerical. One instance will be sufficient to illustrate this. He had gone to visit a man sick with fever; every aperture in the room was, as usual in the sick-rooms of the poor, closed, and the atmosphere was horrible. Before he said a word he ran upstairs, and with a large auger bored several ventilating-holes through the floor above the bed's head. Under the circumstances, he held that pure air was of more immediate consequence than anything he might have to say.

It was during Kingsley's first year as rector of Eversley, in July 1844, that his admiration for the published works of Professor Maurice induced him to write to that excellent man, asking for advice and assistance. I know,' he said, that the request is informal according to the ways of the world, but I 'have faith enough in you to be sure that you will take the request for what it is an earnest struggle to get wisdom at all ' risks from any quarter where it may be found.' This letter led to a correspondence and a friendship which lasted till death dissolved it in 1872. Maurice, a man of strong calm mind, exercised a peculiar charm on all who came under his personal influence. Kingsley, who was fourteen years younger, considered himself throughout rather as Maurice's pupil than friend, and habitually addressed him as My dear, or my dearest, Master.' When, then, we consider that Maurice's clerical work lay in London, and to some extent, by reason of his connexion with Guy's Hospital, amongst the lowest class of the London population; and, on the other hand, that Kingsley never held any parochial charge in London or in any other town, we may conclude that it was by his association with Maurice that he got his knowledge and experience of London life; and that, however much his natural energy forced him to make the subject his own, and notwithstanding his familiar acquaintance with the wants and debasement of the agricultural poor, the theories of social reform, which afterwards brought him for a time into an unfortunate notoriety, were, in part at least, suggested by his senior, and had in them as much of Maurice as of Kingsley.

Meanwhile, and from his first going down into Devonshire after taking his degree, he had been working at a short tale, which, after being written in various forms, in prose and verse, finally appeared in 1848 as the Saint's Tragedy.' This, not

withstanding Bunsen's exaggerated praise, was never popular
in the ordinary sense of the word; the story is repugnant to
popular feeling; the language is, as Maurice wrote in his pre-
face to the first edition, a little too bold for the taste and
temper of the age;' and the social problems in it have been
discussed by the author himself in his later works, and in more
telling prose. It must, in fact, be considered as the unskilled
utterance of the hopes and dreams of a young ardent soul
yearning after truth and love. Reading it by the light of the
present biography, it is difficult to avoid the conviction that
his own mental struggles and aspirations are therein portrayed;
that Walter, Conrad, and the heretic preacher were to him
living personages; that he had in some way-dim, unacknow-
ledged it might be-associated his future wife with the outline
of Elizabeth's character; and that some real memory dictated
the lines, when Lewis exclaims :—

'I have wandered in the mountains, mist-bewildered,
And now a breeze comes, and the veil is lifted,

And priceless flowers, o'er which I trod unheeding,
Gleam ready for my grasp.'

But the six years' thought, study, and labour bestowed on theSaint's Tragedy' were Kingsley's apprenticeship to literary work; his command of language, his power of expression, was enlarged and strengthened, and his later works were written off or dictated at first hand, and almost without correction -the free outpouring of a vivid conception. What he had made his own-what he had seen, heard, read, studied-he could realise and reproduce with extraordinary rapidity. His power of description is remarkable both for correctness and intensity of language. This is the strong point, the great artistic charm, of his writings, which in some other respects betray a want of creative power; for the characters which he has placed in his landscapes, grand as many of them are, are too often so unreal that they are apt to appear as lay figures rather than as living men and women, and the more so that he has continually reproduced the same ideal. The big, strong, fearless, Godless, self-contained man, with a keen sense of duty, brought to a knowledge of his own utter weaknesswhether he is called Lancelot Smith, or Raphael Aben-Ezra, Amyas Leigh, Thomas Thurnall, or even Hereward-constantly appears before us, decked out, indeed, in new clothes, with new paint and new surroundings, but the same ideal figure throughout; and for his favourite women, the characters which he has delineated with the greatest care-Elizabeth of Hungary, Argemone, Hypatia, Mrs. Leigh, Grace Harvey

-have much in common, and though under different names and disguises, are all shaped on one model.

Of all his novels, perhaps the truest, the most real, the most correctly drawn from the life, is also, and for this very reason, the least pleasing. 'Alton Locke' is too realistic; the careless world refuses to accept the horrible picture as a true representation; it thrusts it on one side and will not look at it. The book, in fact, attempts too much: with its strongly marked purpose, it is false to all sound principles of art; and, relating the experiences of fictitious characters, it is equally false to all sound principles of political logic; for no opinions can be based on either its facts or its reasoning. When Alton Locke' was published in 1850, it was looked on, by many good well-meaning men, as a foul attack on the rights and claims of education and society, of law and order. It really was no such thing: so far as intention went it was but the enthusiastic articulation of a mind ignorant of the most elementary principles of political economy; ignorant almost that there was such a science; with a knowledge indeed that the terrible state of things, as described, did exist; but with no knowledge either of the causes which led to it, or of the possible remedies for it. This can now be understood; but in 1850, with the alarm of Chartist insurrections still keenly felt, there were few who did not consider Kingsley as a renegade, an outcast, and a firebrand. That a country clergyman could be found who held such opinions-that is to say rather, opinions such as were attributed to him, and was neither afraid nor ashamed to publish them, seemed to be a new source of fresh danger, which it behoved all right-minded and loyal Englishmen to prepare manfully to withstand.

It may be that Kingsley was rash in writing as he did; that he was on many points misinformed; on many points ignorant; on many premature. Looking at it now, in cold blood, we are apt to say positively that he was. But that he wrote what he did, and as he did, was the natural display of his character: had he written or done otherwise he would not have been Charles Kingsley. With that keen sympathy which he had for suffering humanity; with that appreciation of the wrongs of the poor which had been forced on him for the last ten years, alike by his parochial work and his intimacy with Maurice, he was compelled to speak out; to shriek, you will; to give vent to the cry of anguish and pain and woe, which was nigh choking him. If, as he cried out, he said more, and spoke more strongly than perfect taste or judgment would have allowed, it is not to be wondered at; expediency

if

might have suggested a certain reticence; the warm heart and the outraged soul knew neither taste, nor expediency, nor reticence, but spoke what it believed to be the words of bitterness and truth, careless of what might follow.

The publication of Alton Locke,' as well as of its forerunner Yeast,' is so closely connected with the Chartist gathering of 1848, and with the part which Kingsley took in respect to it, that it is necessary to examine what that part really was; more especially as it has been much misrepresented. That, on April 10, 1848, when the great Chartist demonstration was threatened and expected, Kingsley went to London, and mixed himself up with the agitation, is perhaps all that has been definitely and distinctly known or remembered. Comparing this with many of the passages in Yeast' or 'Alton Locke,' and with imperfect recollections of what happened, a very false impression has remained. What Kingsley really did was this. In consultation with Maurice and other able, earnest men, he wrote and had posted all over London a placard addressed to the Workmen of England!' That this placard spoke as if the men it addressed were fellow-creatures and friends, is the head and front of Kingsley's offence. Reading it now, once again, it is difficult to conceive how it can have been so misunderstood. Its tone is earnest, grave, but as anti-revolutionary as anything possibly can be. Will the Charter, it asks, make you, the Workmen of England, free? Will it free you from slavery to ten-pound bribes? Slavery to beer and gin? Slavery to every spouter who flatters your self-conceit? From such slavery neither Charter nor Act of Parliament can free you. There can be no true freedom without virtue, no true industry without the fear of God.

6

A Letter to Chartists' published shortly afterwards contained a sentence which, separated from its context, has given rise to much misrepresentation. My only quarrel with the 'Charter is that it does not go far enough in reform.' This, taken by itself, would give rise to a very false impression. The letter is, throughout, a manly and honest denunciation of the Charter, both for its vain pretences, and for the abominations with which it had associated itself.

'If any one,' it says, 'will tell me of a country where a charter made the rogues honest, or the idle industrious, I shall alter my opinion of the Charter, but not till then.'

And again, in another place :

'I denounce the weapons which you, Chartists, have been deluded