nted, was Charles Kingsley, who was born in the same
year as George Eliot, on the 18th of June 1819. A fanciful critic might
indulge in a contrast between the sober though not exactly dull scenery
of the Midlands which saw her birth, and that of the most beautiful part
of Devonshire (Holne, on the south-eastern fringe of Dartmoor) where, at
the vicarage which his father held, Kingsley was born. He was educated
at King's College, London, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, took a very
good degree, and very soon after his appointment to the curacy of
Eversley, in Hampshire, became rector thereof in 1844. He held the
living for the rest of his life, dying there on the 23rd January 1875.
It was not, however, by any means his only preferment. In 1860 he was
made Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, not the most fortunate of
appointments; for, with a tendency to small slips in fact at least equal
to that of his friend and brother-in-law Mr. Froude, Kingsley, though
capable of presenting separate aspects and facets of the past admirably,
had not the general historic grasp which redeemed Froude. Nine years
later he resigned the post and was made a Canon of Chester, while in
1873 this was exchanged for a Canonry at Westminster and a Chaplaincy to
the Queen. Otherwise Kingsley's private life was happy and uneventful,
its chief incident being a voyage to the West Indies (which, though
unvisited, he had long before so brilliantly described) in 1871.

His literary work was very large, much varied, and of an excellence
almost more varied than its kinds. He began, of course, with verse, and
his _Saint's Tragedy_ (1848), a drama on the story of St. Elizabeth of
Hungary, was followed by shorter poems (far too few) at different times,
most of them previous to 1858, though the later books contain some
charming fragments, and some appeared posthumously. Of all men who have
written so little verse during as long a life in our time, Kingsley is
probably the best poet. The _Saint's Tragedy_ is a little "viewy" and
fluent. But in _Andromeda_ he has written the very best English
hexameters ever produced, and perhaps the only ones in which that alien
or rebel takes on at least the semblance of a loyal subject to the
English tongue. The rise of the breeze after the passage of the Nereids,
the expostulation of Andromeda with Perseus, and the approach of the
monster, are simply admirable. "The Last Buccaneer" and "The Red
King"--call them "Wardou