reproduced it. Whether his version of the Rubaiyat,
with its sensuous fatalism, its ridicule of asceticism and renunciation,
and its bewildering kaleidoscope of mysticism that becomes materialist
and materialism that becomes mystical, has not indirectly had
influences, practical and literary, the results of which would have been
more abhorrent to FitzGerald than to almost any one else, may be
suggested. But the beauty of the poem as a poem is unmistakable and
altogether astounding. The melancholy richness of the rolling quatrain
with its unicorn rhymes, the quaint mixture of farce and solemnity,
passion and playfulness, the abundance of the imagery, the power of the
thought, the seduction of the rhetoric, make the poem actually, though
not original or English, one of the greatest of English poems.

Of the periodical too, if not entirely, was Richard Harris Barham,
"Thomas Ingoldsby," the author of the most popular book of light verse
that ever issued from the press. His one novel, _My Cousin Nicholas_,
was written for _Blackwood_; the immortal _Ingoldsby Legends_ appeared
in _Bentley_ and _Colburn_. Born at Canterbury in 1788, of a family
possessed of landed property, though not of much, and educated at St.
Paul's School and Brasenose College, Barham took orders, and, working
with thorough conscience as a clergyman, despite his light literature,
became a minor canon in St. Paul's Cathedral. He died in 1845. Hardly
any book is more widely known than the collected _Ingoldsby Legends_,
which originally appeared in the last eight years of their author's
life. Very recently they have met with a little priggish depreciation,
the natural and indeed inevitable result, first of a certain change in
speech and manners, and then of their long and vast popularity. Nor
would any one contend that they are exactly great literature. But for
inexhaustible fun that never gets flat and scarcely ever simply
uproarious, for a facility and felicity in rhyme and rhythm which is
almost miraculous, and for a blending of the grotesque and the terrible
which, if less _fine_ than Praed's or Hood's, is only inferior to
theirs--no one competent to judge and enjoy will ever go to Barham in
vain.

The same difficulty which beset us at the end of the last chapter recurs
here, the difficulty arising from the existence of large numbers of
persons of the third or lower ranks whose inclusion may be desired or
their exclusion resented. At the head, or near