back as 1863 he had suffered from a long illness, induced or aggravated by overwork; and his medical adviser had urged on him entire rest and change of air. Early in 1864 his brother-in-law, Mr. Anthony Froude, had occasion to go to Spain on business connected with his history, and it was resolved that Kingsley should accompany him. The two accordingly started on March 23; but Kingsley was unable to stand the fatigue of the journey, and broke down at Biarritz. After some stay there, he travelled by easy stages to Marseilles, and so back by Lyons: and it is to this tour that we owe the prose idyll From Ocean to Sea.' Some of his letters home are very characteristic. From Bayonne he writes—

'All the horses in France are white except one, which I see at rare intervals. They have the most exquisite little yellow oxen here, rather bigger than a donkey. They put brown holland pinafores on their backs, and great sheepskin mats on their heads, where the yoke comes, and persuade them, as a great favour, to do a little work. But they seem so fond of them that the oxen have much the best of the bargain.' At Biarritz he proposes to stop for a week or so, to botanise ' and breathe sea-champagne,' and from Pau he writes:

'I have taken quite a new turn, and my nerve and strength have come back from three days in the Pyrenees. What I have seen I cannot tell you. Things unspeakable and full of glory. Mountains whose herbage is box, for miles and thousands of feet, then enormous silver firs and beech, up to the eternal snow. We climbed three

hundred feet of easy down, and there it was (the Pic du Midi) right in front, nine thousand feet high, with the winter snow at the base-the eternal snow holding on by claws and teeth where it could above. I I could have looked for hours. I could not speak. I cannot understand it yet. Right and left were other eternal snow peaks; but very horrible. Great white sheets with black points mingling with the clouds, of a dreariness to haunt one's dreams. I don't like snow mountains.'

But neither the sea-champagne' nor the mountain air brought any permanent improvement to his health; after his return to Eversley, in writing to Mr. Maurice, he says, 'I am ' come back better, but not well, and unable to take any mental 'exertion.' And nearly a year later, May 1865, he writes to Mr. Hughes :--

'I am getting better after fifteen months of illness, and I hope to be of some use again some day; a sadder and a wiser man, the former at least I grow every year. I catch a trout now and then out of my ponds. I am too weak for a day's fishing, and the doctors have absolutely forbidden me my salmon.'

But a quieter holiday he was obliged to take as the year got older, and settled with his family, for three months, on the coast of Norfolk.

This wretched state of his health must not be forgotten, in relation to the unfortunate dispute with Dr. Newman, in which, about this time, he became involved. Of that controversy, it is needless now to speak; whatever may have been the merits of the case on either side, it certainly became a contest in dialectics; and Kingsley, whose genius was careless, inexact, impulsive, anything rather than logical, was, at his best, no match for the cool temper and trained skill of the ablest controversialist of the day; as it was, broken down by long-protracted sickness, he was altogether powerless in his hands.

It was thus also, that during the years between 1860 and 1870, his literary work made so little show. In addition to two small volumes of lectures, to Hereward' and the Water Babies,' four volumes of sermons were all that he published; and his reputation, which had indeed grown, had grown simply by itself and out of his older writings. His lectures at Cambridge were, no doubt, popular, amongst the men of that day; but this must be attributed rather to the charm of his manner, and to the earnest way in which he appealed to the better self of the students, than to any particular merit in the lectures themselves; and had they been more intrinsically valuable than, in point of fact, they were, the class to which they were addressed was still much too small to admit of their affecting his literary fame to any great degree. After many hesitations, he definitely resolved in 1869 to resign the professorship. Writing of this determination to the Master of Trinity, on April 1 of that year, he says:

'My brains, as well as my purse, rendered this step necessary. I worked eight or nine months hard for the course of twelve lectures which I gave last term, and was half-witted by the time they were delivered; and as I have to provide for children growing up, I owe it to them not to waste time (which is money) as well as brain, in doing what others can do better.'

From this time onward, there is much in the literary career of Charles Kingsley that indicates a mind prematurely grown old; and though some of his essays, whether in the Prose Idylls' or Health and Education,' are admirable and delightful, his later work, as a whole, seems laboured or fantastic. He comes before us, during these last years of his life, rather as a preacher and an example than as a writer, and sanitary science occupied more and more of his time and thought. In his earlier days he was, not indeed without a latent sneer, called by many the Apostle of Muscular Christianity; a term which he himself altogether rejected as an im

6

6

pertinence, and as either unnecessary or untrue and immoral: untrue and immoral, if it implied an identity between strength and godliness; unnecessary, if it was used merely as an equivalent for the chivalry of the gentle, very perfect knight, loyal to his king and to his God; the ideal of which-developed in the poems of Tasso or Ariosto-culminated in our own Spenser's Fairy Queen: perhaps,' writes Kingsley, the most admirable poem which has ever been penned by mortal man.' It is, however, very certain that he held greatly to the value of strength; strength of body no less than of mind. It is not, we can fancy him saying, poor, decrepit, diseased objects that we want as soldiers of God; we want men who can endure the fatigue and labour of the warfare; we will not offer to the Lord that which costs us nothing. And this, which has been in all ages the theory, though unfortunately not the practice, of the Catholic Church, Kingsley continued to hold; and not the less firmly, because, by an extraordinary perversion of judgment-resulting, if not from downright ignorance or incapacity, then from spite and malice-his works were occasionally classed with those of Ouida,' or the late Mr. Lawrence; as there was anything in common between a noble and manly ideal such as Amyas Leigh and a brutal monstrosity such as Guy Livingstone!

But in his later writings he was even more emphatically the apostle of cleanliness. His views on this subject had indeed been almost extreme from the very first; and his early sermons on the cholera are as outspoken as anything which he afterwards uttered. The difference is that though he had in earlier years associated sanitary reform with political, and though he was, even in 1848, ready to urge on the workmen of London, then agitating for the Charter, the necessity of social improvements and cleanliness of mind and body, as leading to benefits far beyond those which any Charter or Act of Parliament could give, the world at large had paid more attention to his political teaching, and had been more inclined to consider him as a would-be political reformer. In his later years he dropped the political side of the question altogether; his name was no longer mixed up with political disturbances, and his teaching of the requirements of sanitary science, whether by word of mouth or by pen, assumed greater importance.

The small volume published in 1874, under the title of Health and Education,' is made up of several scattered essays and lectures on this and kindred subjects; including more particularly The Science of Health,' 'The Two Breaths,' and Nausicaa in London; ' essays which, without bringing forward

6

any new facts or theories, put what is already known before non-scientific readers in a clear and interesting manner, and are thus likely to be useful. Their leading idea is the keynote of everything that Charles Kingsley has written. To do our duty in this world, towards God and towards man, consistently and steadily, not hysterically, requires the cultivation of all the faculties which God has given us. The mind, in an unhealthy body, is itself unhealthy; care is therefore to be taken to exercise the body, and to keep it in health. Violation of sanitary laws is injurious to health, and acts most of all injuriously on the young; sanitary laws ought therefore to be obeyed by the free will and enlightened judgment of the people; but if they are not so obeyed, then, as far as possible, they ought to be enforced by legislation. It is not without meaning that we have been told that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children; offences against the laws of nature are offences against the laws of God; and the penalty will fall, if not on us, then on those that come after us. From the Saint's Tragedy,' Yeast,' or Alton Locke,' to 'Health and Education,' through a period of nearly thirty years, the same fundamental idea pervades everything that he wrote; his sermons as much as any other of his works. From his point of view, the duty of a Christian, and, above all, of a Christian priest-of a man to whom are superadded his Christianity and his priesthood-was so thoroughly practical and so persistently inculcated, that men of a more theological or polemical type of mind were apt to consider his preaching as savouring too much of the things of this world. Nevertheless, in the more important theological controversies that arose, and concerning which he felt called on to state his opinion, he certainly did not shrink from doing so; and, notwithstanding the stress which he laid on the teaching of natural theology, he has left undoubted proof that, had he lived, he would have been amongst the first to register his protest-though as beyond his line of study, it would have been merely a protest-against such a work as Supernatural Religion,' in much the same way as he actually did protest against Essays and Reviews,' the publication of which he deeply deplored,' or against Bishop Colenso's book on the Pentateuch, which he publicly denounced, in no measured language, as dangerous to the hundreds of thousands, who, being no scholars, must take on trust the historic truth ' of the Bible;' or again, as 'pandering to the cynicism and 'frivolity of many who were already too cynical and frivolous.'

6

6

When Kingsley finally resigned the Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge, he was just fifty years old; but his

health was very indifferent, and the anxieties and worries of the preceding ten years had told heavily on him. Even before that time, Mrs. Kingsley says, he seldom returned from speech 'or lecture without showing that so much life had actually gone 'out of him :' the strain on brain and heart-and his speeches came almost more from the heart than from the brain-was very great; and now, at the age of fifty, he was an old man. His keen sense of enjoyment, even of the enjoyment of that nature in which he had all his life so revelled, seems to have left him, or to have remained with a certain idea of obligation attached to it. This may appear perhaps a paradoxical remark, coming, as it does, before his voyage to the West Indies, and the publication of his journal, with the self-explaining title of 'At Last;' but the work itself, almost more than his letters, suggests it. A sense of weariness, quite foreign to Kingsley's character, runs, like an undercurrent, through the volume. The descriptions are, as always, gorgeous and splendid; perhaps too much so: there is certainly too much of them. As detached papers in Good Words' their effect was good; but, from an artistic point of view, in their collected form, the reader gets surfeited with rapture: the descriptive passages in Westward Ho!' though dictated not by eyeknowledge, but by a vivid imagination corrected by close study, are more interesting and in better taste.

And his letters home, during this time, convey the very sad impression of a man weighed down and worn out; so different in this from those of earlier years, then full of buoyancy and hope: then, even in illness, he wrote of life and happiness and nature's charms; now, from the West Indies, he writes, as I ' ride, I jog myself, and say, You stupid fellow, wake up. Do you see that? and that? Do you know where you are? and my other self answers, Don't bother. I have seen so much, I 'can't take in any more, and don't care about it all.'

6

His absence from Eversley did not, however, extend beyond about three months; and on his return, in February 1870, he settled steadily down to his parish work until, in the May following, he went into official residence at Chester, where he had been appointed by Mr. Gladstone to a canonry in the previous August. Out of this residence, and the class in physical science which he started for the young men of the town, grew the Chester Natural History Society, which now numbers from 500 to 600 members. To this society, into which the original class speedily developed, the lectures, afterwards published as Town Geology,' were first given; lectures which, in a remarkably clear, popular, and interesting