Such was Shorthouse’s best and most romantic hour.  He had a deep-seated love of ritual; in spite of his inherited quietism—­but for all that he was a very liberal Churchman, of the school of Kingsley rather than of the school of Pusey.  Ritual was to him a beautiful adjunct; not a symbolical preoccupation.

The mystery is why this very delicate and unique flower of art should have sprung up on this particular soil.  The most that one hopes for, in the way of literary interest, from such surroundings, is a muddled optimism, rather timidly expressed, based on the writings of Robert Browning and Carlyle.  Instead of this, one gets this precieux antique style, based upon the Bible and John Bunyan, and enriched by a transparent power of tinging modern English with an ancient and secluded flavour.

It shows how very little surroundings and influences have to do with the growth of an artistic instinct, because in the case of Shorthouse it seems to have been a purely spontaneous product.  He followed no one; he had the advantage of no trained criticism; because it seems that his only critic was his wife, and though Mrs. Shorthouse appears in these pages as a very courageous, loyal, and devoted woman, it is clear from the record that she had no special literary gift.

The rarity of the thing is part of its wonder.  It is possible to tell upon the fingers of one hand, or at all events on the fingers of two hands, the names of all the nineteenth-century writers who have handled prose with any marked delicacy.  There are several effective prose-writers, but very few artists.  Prose has been employed in England till of late merely as a straightforward method of enforcing and expressing ideas, in a purely scientific manner.  Literary craftsmen have turned rather to verse, and here the wonder grows, because one or two specimens of Shorthouse’s verse are given, which reveal an absolute incapacity for the process, without apparently the smallest instinct for rhyme, metre, or melody,—­the very lowest sort of slipshod amateur poetry.

After Shorthouse had once tasted the delights of publication and the pleasures of fame he wrote too much, and fiddled rather tediously upon a single string.  Moreover, he attempted humorous effects, not very successfully; because one of the interesting points about, John Inglesant is that there is hardly the slightest touch of humour from beginning to end, except perhaps in the fantastic mixture of tragedy and comedy in the carnival scene, presided over by the man who masquerades as a corpse; and even here the humour is almost entirely of a macabre type.