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Soon an ill wind blew Kingsley some good, for through the 

 absconding of the rector, with many creditors left behind him, the 

 cure of the parish was given to Kingsley. He was married in the 

 June of 1844. The debts of the last rector and the smallness of 

 the living were amongst the causes which drove him into the 

 writing of his novels. Nothing he ever did will last as long as 

 these novels. No other field could have offered such scope for 

 his peculiar genius. The dramatic instinct was very strong in 

 him. What Emerson writes of Carlyle is also descriptive of 

 Kingsley — " Those devouring eyes and that pourtraying hand ! " 

 What power he had of pitching his tent in an earlier age, of 

 talking its dialect and living its life. Perhaps no one ever called 

 spirits from the vasty deep so triumphantly as Kingsley, those 

 grand silent Elizabethan Admirals in " Westward Ho/' and 

 those Neo-Platonists and monks of the critical 5th century in 

 " Hypatia." Every page of his novels proves how well he had 

 studied and discerned the deepest needs of his own generation, 

 and how skilfully and obliquely he could meet them. 



But we must back to his parish and think of him as sitting up 

 whole nights nursing dying men, attending to the ventilation of sick 

 rooms, seeing to the drains daily when the cholera visited Eversley. 

 He boasted that he knew every man jack of them, and that was 

 why Eversley work was more pleasant to him than preaching as 

 Canon of Westminster. In the Abbey the faces were all but 

 unknown. Not so at Eversley; there he knew all — the groom, 

 the labourer, the gipsy, and even the old poacher. Men sprang 

 to touch at every point. He tried to save men by Jiope, believing 

 that there was a "latent chivalry in the heart of every clod." 

 He so looked up to the poor for the sake of the poor Man of 

 Nazareth, that they could but look up to him. He never blushed 

 nor feared to make his sermons simple and colloquial. He never 

 let pubhc worship become ' 'dead bones. ' ' He strove and prayed day 

 and night, till he had put life into it. The very churchyard was 

 made to "blossom as the rose " on Sunday. He himself had planted 

 the yew trees and bordered the paths with box, and trained his 

 children and villagers to brighten the graves with flowers before 

 the service on the Sunday morn. He keenly felt and made his 

 listeners feel the seasons of the Christian Year, the happy Christ- 

 mas, the plaintive Lent, the triumphant Easter. There was no 

 stiffness or starch in his reverence. It was but its depth and 

 not its shallowness that stayed him between the altar and the 

 pulpit to carry a rare but lame butterfly to the safety of the 

 vestry. He felt God so in everything that he would visit a dying 

 man one hour and be trout-fishing in the next. He could pass 

 quickly from jest to earnest, because his humour was as pure as 

 his seriousness, like the humour of Augustine. Perhaps in the 

 '! Water Babies " Kingsley's humour found its freest vent. 



