ism; the wretched, pauperized, poaching sneak, Crawy;-and the brilliant, easy-going, but unhappy Bracebridge. In each and all of them we recognise a rare eye for the perception of class distinctions and individual characteristics, and as rare a power of depicting both.

The book has been misjudged, as every book with an unconcealed ethical aim is sure to be, and abused for being what it makes no profession of being, and was never intended to be. It is not a guide to amelioration of existing evils in any other sense than as it unshrinkingly drags them to light, and fearlessly puts their right names upon their foreheads. It breaks off just as it carries its hero to the point of that belief in God's personal government of the world, on which all true improvement of our society must, in the author's view, be founded; and there it leaves us-the hero wandering away into Cloudland, under the guidance of the mysterious Barnakill, on his pilgrimage to a christian Utopia.

But viewed as the description of an individual mind, struggling through the besetting doubts of all honest enquirers in this day, to a clear conception of God's dealing with man, no less than as a picture of contemporary life--especially some of the saddest sides of it," Yeast" has a deep interest, and a real and rare value, especially for the class of which Lancelot is the type; and from that class must come those who are to shape the England of the next generation.

It is easier to see the drift and purpose of " Alton Locke" than to form a judgment of the book. For the struggle it depicts, the view of life it sets before us, and the experiences out of which the hero's powers and opinions are formed, are those of the artizan world of London; of whichmuch to our shame, and somewhat too to its own blame-the middle and literary class know very little. Mr. Kingsley has, doubtless, both in the course of clerical and philanthropic labours, been thrown into frequent and close contact with this wide-spread substratum of London clay. He has taken honorable and active part with Mr. Maurice, and others of the same way of thinking, in attempts to associate artizans in undertakings of co-operative labour, and in the foundation and teaching of the College for Working Men. His genial, bold, and strongly sympathetic character; the honesty with which he faces facts, and the outspokenness with which he calls a spade a spade-all qualities unhappily rare among clergymen of the Establishment, or indeed among any class or calling amongst us-may well have won for him a share of confidence rarely accorded by the artizan to his clerical visitors. And if any body but a real artizan has the right or power to put himself

in the artizan's point of view, and speak in his name, few can show better titles to do so than Mr. Kingsley. We do not mean to express an opinion that "Alton Locke" is an unfaithful or improbable representative of the mental development of an intelligent and imaginative artizan, or even to doubt the fidelity of the delineation. But we have no standard to test the work by such as we have in the case of "Yeast," where the doubts and difficulties, the experiences and struggles, are those of our own class.

In "Alton Locke" Mr. Kingsley appears as an autobiographer, in the character of a tailor, poet, and chartist, who, leaves the narrow sectarian training of a stern but loving Baptist mother for the reckless discipline of a tailor's workroom, and desperate struggles of self-education, under circumstances no worse than those recorded by Gifford and Holcroft; till by aid of a crabbed but kindly Scotchman-—an old bookseller-he qualifies himself to be the poet of his order, a chartist lecturer, and a contributor to the democratic press. In the course of these experiences he is brought within the influence of two beautiful and refined women, relatives of a Church dignitary; and even, by countenance of an unscrupulous cousin, gets a glimpse of Cambridge life. He falls, however, from these altitudes to trial and conviction, for participation in disorders following on an harangue which he has made to a meeting of starving labourers in one of the Eastern counties; afterwards participates in the abortive Chartist demonstration of the 10th of April, 1848; till at last, with a mind soured by disappointment, and a constitution shattered by early hardship and subsequent privation and imprisonment, he falls once more under the influence of his better angel in the person of the noble and selfdenying woman whom he had encountered, but not appreciated, earlier in his career; and by her help and a legacy from the old Scotchman, is enabled to sail for Texas. The autobiography is supposed to have been written on the voyage, as the hero of it is sinking under the consumption which carries him off before the ship enters her port of destination.

This framework enables Mr. Kingsley to exhibit the aspect which, in his conception, the world wears to a working man of exceptional intelligence, and there is internal consistency in the work. But that reality of experience which would give especial value to the picture, is not here present. Mr. Kingsley, in Lancelot Smith, was giving us the bulletins of his own mental battles; but in "Alton Locke" he is painfully working up a cento from blue books and district visitings, from reports of Morning Chronicle commissioners, and intercourse with individual artizans. That an effective book may be made in this

way,

"Alton Locke" shows. That the writer is in deep earnest, we know. That his worst descriptions do not go beyond hideous realities, we know also; but, nevertheless, the book is not the work of one of that class whose inner life and mental growth it purports to describe autobiographically.

It would be unfair, however, to join in the clamour that has been raised against many of the opinions in the tale,-as for example, those on the Church, on University Education, on the evil effects of competition, and the means by which these effects are to be counteracted. Mr. Kingsley has been attacked as if these opinions were his own, and not those of the fictitious Alton Locke. The more extravagant these opinions are, the less reconcileable with a wide view of facts and sound laws of political economy, --the more they would be in character with a theorist as poor, as unhealthy, as passionate, and as discontented as the tailor-poet. The important point for us to consider in forming a literary judgment of the work, is, whether it be consistent with itself-whether these are the opinions likely to be formed in a mind so trained, working on such materials for observation and deduction. And we are not prepared to say that Mr. Kingsley has failed in this particular. At all events, there can be no question of the reality of the black cloud which rests on the life of men in Alton Locke's positionof the squalor and unhealthiness of their homes, the pestiferous state of the streets they must perforce inhabit, and the workshops, in which they have no choice but to toil; nor of the bodyand-soul crushing labour to which work-people in certain callings have been reduced, with no alternative between it and starvation or the workhouse. We accept Mr. Kingsley as a truthful and uncompromising describer of the terrible conditions under which so many thousands are condemned for the present to live and die, though we may not be inclined to consider that Alton Locke himself always refers the evil to its right cause. But even in this respect the book has been unjustly blamed; for Alton Locke's different schemes of amelioration melt away from under him one by one, and he is left at last, as Lancelot Smith was left in " Yeast," just as he arrives at a view of God's relations to man, which sets him at rest as to the goodness and wisdom of the Almighty, if it does not reveal to him any positive ground of hope for the amelioration of the circumstances under which his own order suffer, other than individual godliness of life and dealing on the part of both employers and employed, by dint of which men are to reach at last the true freedom, equality, and brotherhood,-the likeness of God in Christ. The book is full of examples of Mr. Kingsley's passionate sympathy with suffering, his powers

as a conceiver of character, and as a painter of action and of landscape.

Here is a description of the puzzling fashion under which Christianity was presented to the son of a Baptist mother :

"Of 'vital Christianity' I heard much; but, with all my efforts, could find out nothing. Indeed, it did not seem interesting enough to tempt me to find out much. It seemed a set of doctrines, believing in which was to have a magical effect on people, by saving them from the everlasting torture due to sins and temptations which I had never felt. Now and then, believing, in obedience to my mother's assurances, and the solemn prayers of the ministers about me, that I was a child of hell, and a lost and miserable sinner, I used to have accesses of terror, and fancy that I should surely wake next morning in everlasting flames. Once I put my finger a moment into the fire, as certain Papists, and Protestants too, have done, not only to themselves, but to their disciples, to see if it would be so very dreadfully painful; with what conclusions the reader may judge. . . . Still, I could not keep up the excitement. Why should I? The fear of pain is not the fear of sin, that I know of; and, indeed, the thing was unreal altogether in my case, and my heart, my common-sense rebelled against it again and again; till at last I got a terrible whipping for taking my little sister's part, and saying that if she was to die,-so gentle, and obedient, and affectionate as she was-God would be very unjust in sending her to hell-fire, and that I was quite certain he would do no such thing-unless he were the Devil: an opinion which I have since seen no reason to change. The confusion between the King of Hell and the King of Heaven has cleared up, thank God, since then!

"So I was whipped and put to bed-the whipping altering my secret heart just about as much as the dread of hell-fire did."

Who that has followed the mad rush of the crowd at a Cambridge boat-race but will feel his pulse quicken as he reads the following description?

"Oh, the Babel of horse and foot, young and old! the cheering, and the exhorting, and the objurgations of number this, and num ber that! and the yelling of the most sacred names, intermingled too often with oaths.-And yet, after a few moments, I ceased to wonder either at the Cambridge passion for boat-racing, or at the excitement of the spectators. Honi soit qui mal y pense.' It was a noble sport-a sight such as could only be seen in England— some hundred of young men, who might, if they had chosen, been lounging effeminately about the streets, subjecting themselves voluntarily to that intense exertion, for the mere pleasure of toil. The true English stuff came out there; I felt that, in spite of all my prejudices-the stuff which has held Gibraltar and conquered at Waterloo-which has created a Birmingham and a Manchester, and colonised every quarter of the globe-that grim, earnest, stubborn

energy, which, since the days of the old Romans, the English possess alone of all the nations of the earth. I was as proud of the gallant young fellows, as if they had been my brothers-of their courage and endurance (for one could see that it was no child's play, from the pale faces, and panting lips), their strength and activity, so fierce and yet so cultivated, smooth, harmonious as oar kept time with oar, and every back rose and fell in concert-and felt my soul stirred up to a sort of sweet madness, not merely by the shouts and cheers of the mob around me, but by the loud fierce pulse of the rowlocks, the swift whispering rush of the long snake-like eight oars, the swirl and gurgle of the water in their wake, the grim, breathless silence of the straining rowers. My blood boiled over, and fierce tears swelled into my eyes; for I, too, was a man, and an Englishman; and when I caught sight of my cousin, pulling stroke to the second boat in the long line, with set teeth and flashing eyes, the great muscles on his bare arms springing up into knots at every rapid stroke, I ran and shouted among the maddest and the foremost."

Let those who know the Eastern Counties testify to the fidelity of this dreary landscape :

"About eight o'clock the next morning, I started forth with my guide, the shoemaker, over as desolate a country as men can well conceive. Not a house was to be seen for miles, except the knot of hovels which we had left, and here and there a great dreary lump of farm-buildings, with its yard of yellow stacks. Beneath our feet the earth was iron, and the sky iron above our heads. Dark curdled clouds, which had built up everywhere an under-roof of doleful grey,' swept on before the bitter northern wind, which whistled through the low leafless hedges and rotting wattles, and crisped the dark sodden leaves of the scattered hollies, almost the only trees in sight.

We trudged on, over wide stubbles, thick with innumerable weeds; over wide fallows, in which the deserted ploughs stood frozen fast; then over clover and grass, burnt black with frost; then over a field of turnips, where we passed a large fold of hurdles, within which some hundred sheep stood, with their heads turned from the cutting blast. All was dreary, idle, silent; no sound or sign of human beings. One wondered where the people lived, who cultivated so vast a tract of civilised, over-peopled, nineteenthcentury England. As we came up to the fold, two little boys hailed us from the inside-two little wretches with blue noses and white cheeks, scarecrows of rags and patches, their feet peeping through bursten shoes twice too big for them, who seemed to have shared between them a ragged pair of worsted gloves, and cowered among the sheep, under the shelter of a hurdle, crying and inarticulate with cold.

"What's the matter, boys?'

Turmits is froze, and us can't turn the handle of the cutter. Do ye gie us a turn, please!'