manner, put forward the truths of geological science. Considered as what it is, a series of first lessons in geology to men of comparatively limited education, the book is one of very great merit; and whilst within a small compass it gives a good deal of sound teaching, it does much more: it marks emphatically the distinction which Kingsley himself so often insisted on: it is a book of education, rather than of instruction; its tendency and meaning throughout is to induce those who read it to go a-field, and work the matter out for themselves; to recognise the presence of God in every one of His creations ;and to worship, not by mere form of words, but by understanding and by knowledge.

This feeling which with him was life itself, he has specially emphasized in Town Geology:

'I deny,' he has said, 'the epithet of secular to anything which God has made, even to the tiniest of insects, the most insignificant atom of dust. The grain of dust is a thought of God; God's power made it; God's wisdom gave it whatsoever properties or qualities it may possess; God's providence has put it in the place where it is now, and has ordained that it should be in that place at that moment, by a train of causes and effects which reaches back to the very creation of the universe.'

He was thus led at times to do things which, in other men, would be called eccentric: they were not so in him: the stooping to pick up a wounded butterfly, which lay in his way one Sunday morning as he passed from the altar to the pulpit, was to him as much a religious act as the preaching the sermon which followed. How thoroughly this feeling and opinion pervaded his every thought, and influenced his every action, may be traced throughout all that he has written; and nowhere more clearly than in the last volume which was published during his life, the Westminster Sermons.' The Preface to this is, in the main, a reprint of a lecture on Natural Theology, delivered at Sion's College in 1871; it is perhaps the most exact and forcible statement of his opinion that the world is God's world, not the devil's; and that the ideal of a devotional hymn is not one with such a key-note as, 'Change and decay ' in all around I see;' but rather, 'O all ye works of the Lord, bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.'

During the summer of 1870 he withdrew from a connexion he had formed with the extreme agitators in favour of socalled Woman's Rights.' But the extent of that connexion was much exaggerated by popular report: nothing that he ever wrote, or publicly taught, is consonant with the idea of his holding their views on this subject; much is very positively

opposed to it. In one of his latest essays, Thrift,' he has most distinctly said—

'I beg you to put out of your minds, at the outset, any fancy that I wish for a social revolution in the position of women: whatever defects there may have been in the past education of British women, it has been most certainly a splendid moral success: it has made British women the best wives, mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, that the world, as far as I can discover, has yet seen.'

Whatever crotchets he may once have entertained, at this time he certainly limited himself to upholding the necessity for a great improvement in the education of women. He held that, as at present conducted, the education of women too often results in gross ignorance of all that a woman, as the possible future mother of a family and head of a household, ought to know; and leads to an oriental waste of money, ' and waste of time; to a fondness for mere finery; to the mis'taken fancy that it is the mark of a lady to sit idle, and let 'servants do everything for her.' He advocates, in the plainest manner, the instruction of women in all the homely details of domestic management; cooking, household-work, dress-making; and trusts he may reassure those who fear that by an improved education women will be withdrawn from their existing sphere of interest and activity; though it is not, he says, surprising that they should entertain such a fear, after the extravagant 'opinions and schemes which have been lately broached in ' various quarters.' Nothing can be more utterly opposed to these extravagant opinions and schemes than teachings such as his. One opinion, however, Kingsley did hold very strongly; and, during his later years at least, seldom lost an opportunity of advocating it. That as women had the entire management and control of children, they ought, even more than men, to be scientifically instructed in the laws of health; and that to give this instruction there ought to be fully qualified female instructors. That of these, some might, amongst their own sex, practise as physicians, would be almost a natural sequence, and as such he doubtless accepted it; but we do not remember that he ever distinctly advocated it.

Early in 1873 he was appointed, and again by Mr. Gladstone, from Chester to a vacant stall in Westminster Abbey; and his mother, then in her eighty-sixth year, just lived to know of it: she died on April 16. His new duties called on him to preach frequently in the Abbey; and he thus became better and more widely known to the great crowds of London. There has, perhaps, never been a preacher who could in any sense be called popular, who had less of the popular manner.

His voice, more especially when raised in the occasional services in the nave, was harsh; and the effort to overcome a certain inclination to stammer, made it seem, at times, almost affected. But the earnestness which he threw into the subject before him, captivated all his hearers, and gave a dignity to his homely and familiar language, which reached to their hearts as well as to their understandings. And one abiding effect there is; that whilst popular sermons--which so often owe their popularity to the mere fluency or manner of the preacher-are commonly the most wearisome of reading, Kingsley's sermons, of which there are many volumes, are only less delightful when read than when first heard.

That his promotion to Westminster might prove but the stepping-stone to a higher post, was the natural conclusion of his friends, and was freely spoken of by them in their letters of congratulation. Kingsley himself had no such ambition. He would, no doubt, have accepted further promotion if it had come to him; he would have considered it as a call to a higher responsibility which he could not decline; but it is plain that, meantime, he honestly meant what he said, when he wrote:

'What better fate than to spend one's old age under the shadow of that Abbey, and close to the highest mental activities of England, with leisure to cultivate myself, and write, if I will, deliberately, but not for daily bread. A deanery or bishopric would never give me that power.'

But however much he was inclined to content himself with the prospect of rest, he could not but be surprised, as well as flattered, by the extraordinary outburst of congratulation, not only from friends, but from strangers. Mrs. Kingsley speaks of it as sympathy, and as a triumph which wiped out many bitter passages in the past.' It may have been so, to some extent; but Mrs. Kingsley, in her anxious and devoted affection, has perhaps a rather exaggerated sense of the difficulties against which her husband had to contend. Much severe and even hostile criticism he had, no doubt, had to endure; but who that emerges from the dull crowd has not a similar experience? That Kingsley's nervous and sensitive temperament had felt it very bitterly, is likely enough; but for years back there had been nothing to disturb the peace of any man at all accustomed to public life. It would seem more probable that petty worries of domestic economy, and anxious cares for the future, things impossible for his wife to write about, had even seriously affected his health; that these were the most real grounds for sympathy; that the release from all money cares was the most real cause for congratulation.

VOL. CXLV. NO. CCXCVIII.

H H

That his health was indeed in a very precarious state appears constantly. His eldest son, Maurice, who had been employed on a railway-survey in Mexico, came home on a visit about the time of his father's appointment to Westminster, and was 'so much struck with his broken appearance that he urged ' upon him rest and change, and a sea-voyage, before he entered Ion a position of fresh responsibility.' His medical advisers also strongly recommended the change; but it was the following year before he could be persuaded to go for a time to America. He sailed for New York on January 29, 1874, accompanied by his eldest daughter, who had before been with him in the West Indies.

The Americans of all classes received him with open arms and much hospitality; and in freedom from work and worry, perhaps, too, in pleasant excitement, his health seems to have much improved. He himself took-or, perhaps, with the wish to lessen his wife's anxiety, pretended to take a most favourable view of it. On March 8 he writes: I have not been so well for years; my digestion is perfect, and I am in high spirits; and again, on March 23: I do not tire the least, sleep at night, and rise in the morning as fresh as a lark to ' eat a good breakfast.'

Of his travels in America it would be needless to speak. He was taken everywhere and shown everything, from Niagara and the Yosemite Valley to San Francisco. When the Americans wish to display hospitality, no people on the face of the earth can do it better; when they wish to lionise a stranger, there are few people who can gather larger and more frequent crowds; and Kingsley, in renewed health and spirits, seems to have very thoroughly enjoyed both the hospitality and the lionising, in the course of which he delivered the lecture-room trifles which have been, with rather doubtful judgment, published since his death.

The

The end of all this was, however, very sad. The climate of San Francisco, with a hot sun and a chilling wind, is excessively trying: and Kingsley caught a severe cold. doctors there ordered him to leave the city as quickly as possible; and though still very ill, he managed to reach Denver and to get on to Colorado Springs, where he was laid up for some weeks with a severe attack of pleurisy. From this he recovered; but when he returned home in August, was certainly not the stronger for his expedition. A severe attack of congestion of the liver followed in September, just as he went into residence at Westminster, and his health continued ex

tremely feeble, rendered more so by the anxiety caused by the dangerous illness of his wife.

On Advent Sunday, November 29, 1874, he preached his last sermon in Westminster Abbey. It was the winding up of his work in the Abbey; it was, in fact, the winding up of his work on earth. A great storm was raging, and the fierce gale, which seemed almost to shake the vast pile, gave a point to his discourse, the subject of which was suggested by the day. He spoke at great length, with a fervour and beauty which he himself had never surpassed, of the many different ways in which Christ may make known His coming; in joy, in sorrow, in prosperity, in failure; in the repose of Nature, or ' He may come, as He may come this very night to 'many a gallant soul; not in the repose of Nature, but in her rage; in howling storm, and blinding foam, and ruthless rocks, and whelming surge; and whisper to them even so, as the 'sea swallows all of them which it can take, of calm beyond 'which this world cannot give and cannot take away.' 'But,' he concluded, 'in whatsoever way Thou comest, even so come, Lord Jesus.' They were the last words he spoke in public. On December 3, in company with his wife, he went to Eversley; but the journey over-taxed Mrs. Kingsley's strength; her illness again took a serious form, and she was considered to be in most imminent danger. In attending on her, and careless of his own health, Kingsley, who had been far from well, caught a fresh cold. This resulted in pneumonia, and after lingering for a few weeks, more or less under the influence of opiates, he died quietly on January 23, 1875.

It had been wished by some that the late Canon of Westminster should be buried within the Abbey; his family, however, guided by his own wishes, happily determined that he should rest in the churchyard of the parish of which he had been so long the Rector, and with which his name will ever be associated. The churchyard is separated by a low wall from the garden which it had been the Rector's joy and delight to adorn; this, from the wilderness which it was in 1844, had become, even in the eyes of the professional gardener, one of the beauty-spots of the South of England; not in modern fashion, a mere blaze of gaudy bedding-out plants, but arranged by the taste and feeling of the historian, the poet, the artist, and the naturalist. The Rectory itself, though as a dwelling incommodious and damp, or even wet, is from an outside point of view exceedingly pretty. It is described as literally covered with vegetation; a mass of magnolias, Japanese honeysuckle, wistarias, ceanothus, roses, and ivy. In front of it stand three