In this, too, he was weak; that he had altogether forgotten that the fire from off the altar could only be kept alight by continual self-restraint and self-sacrifice, by continual gentleness and humility, shown in the petty matters of everyday home-life; and that he who cannot rule his own household can never rule the Church of God.  And so it befell, that amid the little cross-blasts of home squabbles the sacred spark was fast going out.  The poems written after he settled at Penalva are marked by a less definite purpose, by a lower tone of feeling:  not, perhaps, by a lower moral tone; but simply by less of any moral tone at all.  They are more and more full of merely sensuous beauty, mere word-painting, mere word-hunting.  The desire of finding something worth saying gives place more and more to that of saying something in a new fashion.  As the originality of thought (which accompanies only vigorous moral purpose) decreases, the attempt at originality of language increases.  Manner, in short, has taken the place of matter.  The art, it may be, of his latest poems is greatest:  but it has been expended on the most unworthy themes.  The later are mannered caricatures of the earlier, without their soul; and the same change seems to have passed over him which (with Mr. Ruskin’s pardon) transformed the Turner of 1820 into the Turner of 1850.

Thus had Elsley transferred what sympathy he had left from needle-women and ragged schools, dwellers in Jacob’s Island and sleepers in the dry arches of Waterloo Bridge, to sufferers of a more poetic class.  Whether his sympathies showed thereby that he had risen or fallen, let my readers decide each for himself.  It is a credit to any man to feel for any human being; and Italy, as she is at this moment, is certainly one of the most tragic spectacles which the world has ever seen.  Elsley need not be blamed for pitying her; only for holding, with most of our poets, a vague notion that her woes were to be cured by a hair of the dog who bit her; viz., by homoeopathic doses of that same “art” which has been all along her morbid and self-deceiving substitute for virtue and industry.  So, as she had sung herself down to the nether pit, Elsley would help to sing her up again; and had already been throwing off, ever since 1848, a series of sonnets which he entitled Eurydice, intimating, of course, that he acted as the Orpheus.  Whether he had hopes of drawing iron tears down Pluto Radetzky’s cheek, does not appear; but certainly the longer poem which had sprung from his fancy, at the urgent call of Messrs. Brown and Younger, would have been likely to draw nothing but iron balls from Radetzky’s cannon; or failing so vast an effect, an immediate external application to the poet himself of that famous herb Pantagruelion, cure for all public ills and private woes, which men call hemp.  Nevertheless, it was a noble subject; one which ought surely to have been taken up by some of our poets, for if they do not