He wrote some excellent pieces (of their kind) in prose, besides the one already mentioned:  the weird and well-constructed ‘Leech of Folkestone’ and the ‘Passage in the Life of Henry Harris,’ both half-serious tales of mediaeval magic; the thoroughly Ingoldsbian ‘Legend of Sheppey,’ with its irreverent farce, high animal spirits, and antiquarianism; the equally characteristic ‘Lady Rohesia,’ which would be vulgar but for his sly wit and drollery.  But none of these are as familiar as the versified ‘Legends,’ nor have they the astonishing variety of entertainment found in the latter.

The ‘Ingoldsby Legends’ have been called an English naturalization of the French metrical contes; but Barham owes nothing to his French models save the suggestion of method and form.  Not only is his matter all his own, but he has Anglified the whole being of the metrical form itself.  His facility of versification, the way in which the whole language seems to be liquid in his hands and ready to pour into any channel of verse, was one of the marvelous things of literature.  It did not need the free random movement of the majority of the tales, where the lines may be anything from one foot to six, from spondaic to dactylic:  in some of them he tied himself down to the most rigid and inflexible metrical forms, and moved as lightly and freely in those fetters as if they were non-existent.  As to the astonishing rhymes which meet us at every step, they form in themselves a poignant kind of wit; often double and even treble, one word rhyming with an entire phrase or one phrase with another,—­not only of the oddest kind, but as nicely adapted to the necessities of expression and meaning as if intended or invented for that purpose alone,—­they produce on us the effect of the richest humor.

One of his most diverting “properties” is the set of “morals” he draws to everything, of nonsensical literalness and infantile gravity, the perfection of solemn fooling.  Thus in the ‘Lay of St. Cuthbert,’ where the Devil has captured the heir of the house,

     “Whom the nurse had forgot and left there in his chair,
     Alternately sucking his thumb and his pear,”

the moral is drawn, among others,—­

     “Perhaps it’s as well to keep children from plums,
     And pears in their season—­and sucking their thumbs.”

And part of the moral to the ‘Lay of St. Medard’ is—­

     “Don’t give people nicknames! don’t, even in fun,
     Call any one ’snuff-colored son of a gun’!”

And they generally wind up with some slyly shrewd piece of worldly wisdom and wit.  Thus, the closing moral to ’The Blasphemer’s Warning’ is:—­

     “To married men this—­For the rest of your lives,
     Think how your misconduct may act on your wives! 
     Don’t swear then before them, lest haply they faint,
     Or—­what sometimes occurs—­run away with a Saint!”

Often they are broader yet, and intended for the club rather than the family.  Indeed, the tales as a whole are club tales, with an audience of club-men always in mind; not, be it remembered, bestialities like their French counterparts, or the later English and American improvements on the French, not even objectionable for general reading, but full of exclusively masculine joking, allusions, and winks, unintelligible to the other sex, and not welcome if they were intelligible.