es of property as he put forward, of the claims of labor,
and of the responsibilities of the aristocracy, had not been often heard
at Oxford. He was called a Socialist and a Radical, but it mattered
little to him by what name he was known to those whose consciences were
not touched by his appeal. "Will you say," he writes toward the end of
this pamphlet, "this is all rhetoric and declamation? There is, I dare
say, something too much in that kind. What with criticizing style and
correcting exercises, we college tutors perhaps may be likely, in the
heat of composition, to lose sight of realities, and pass into the limbo
of the factitious,--especially when the thing must be done at odd times,
in any case, and, if at all, quickly. But if I have been obliged to
write hurriedly, believe me, I have obliged myself to think not hastily.
And believe me, too, though I have desired to succeed in putting vividly
and forcibly that which vividly and forcibly I felt and saw, still the
graces and splendors of composition were thoughts far less present to my
mind than Irish poor men's miseries, English poor men's hardships, and
your unthinking indifference. Shocking enough the first and the second,
almost more shocking the third."

It was about this time that the most widely known of his works, "The
Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, a Long-Vacation Pastoral," was written. It
was published in 1848, and though it at once secured a circle of warm
admirers, and the edition was very soon exhausted, it "is assuredly
deserving of a far higher popularity than it has ever attained." The
poem was reprinted in America, at Cambridge, in 1849, and it may be
safely asserted that its merit was more deeply felt and more generously
acknowledged by American than by English readers. The fact that its
essential form and local coloring were purely and genuinely English, and
thus gratified the curiosity felt in this country concerning the social
habits and ways of life in the mother-land, while on the other hand its
spirit was in sympathy with the most liberal and progressive thought
of the age, may sufficiently account for its popularity here. But
the lovers of poetry found delight in it, apart from these
characteristics,--in its fresh descriptions of Nature, its healthy
manliness of tone, its scholarly construction, its lively humor, its
large thought quickened and deepened by the penetrating imagination of
the poet.

"Any one who has read it will acknowledge th