The picture which Sir John Coleridge puts before us, though deficient in what is striking and brilliant, is a sufficiently remarkable and uncommon one.  It is the picture of a man of high cultivation and intellect, in whom religion was not merely something flavouring and elevating life, not merely a great element and object of spiritual activity, but really and unaffectedly the one absorbing interest, and the spring of every thought and purpose.  Whether people like such a character or not, and whether or not they may think the religion wrong, or distorted and imperfect, if they would fairly understand the writer of the Christian Year they must start from this point.  He was a man who, without a particle of the religious cant of any school, without any self-consciousness or pretension or unnatural strain, literally passed his clays under the quick and pervading influence, for restraint and for stimulus, of the will and presence of God.  With this his whole soul was possessed; its power over him had not to be invoked and stirred up; it acted spontaneously and unnoticed in him; it was dominant in all his activity; it quenched in him aims, and even, it may be, faculties; it continually hampered the free play of his powers and gifts, and made him often seem, to those who had not the key, awkward, unequal, and unintelligible.  But for this awful sense of truth and reality unseen, which dwarfed to him all personal thoughts and all present things, he might have been a more finished writer, a more attractive preacher, a less indifferent foster-father to his own works.  But it seemed to him a shame, in the presence of all that his thoughts habitually dwelt with, to think of the ordinary objects of authorship, of studying anything of this world for its own sake, of perfecting works of art, of cultivating the subtle forces and spells of language to give attractiveness to his writings.  Abruptness, inadequacy, and obscurity of expression were light matters, and gave him little concern, compared with the haunting fear of unreal words.  This “seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,” as he understood it, was the basis of all that he was; it was really and unaffectedly his governing principle, the root of his affections and his antipathies, just as to other men is the passion for scientific discovery or political life.

But within these limits, and jealously restrained by these conditions, a strongly marked character, exuberant with power and life, and the play of individual qualities, displayed itself.  There were two intellectual sides to his mind—­one which made him a poet, quickness and delicacy of observation and sympathetic interpretation, the realising and anticipating power of deep feeling and penetrative imagination; the other, at first sight, little related to poetry, a hard-headed, ingenious, prosaic shrewdness and directness of common sense, dealing practically with things as they are and on the whole, very little curious about scientific