He has plenty of melody, but it is hardly recognized because of the doggerel meaning, which swamps the music in the farce.  And this applies to more important things than the melody.  The average reader floats on the surface of this rapid and foamy stream, covered with sticks and straws and flowers and bonbons, and never realizes its depth and volume.  This light frothy verse is only the vehicle of a solid and laborious antiquarian scholarship, of an immense knowledge of the world and society, books and men.  He modestly disclaimed having any imagination, and said he must always have facts to work upon.  This was true; but the same may be said of some great poets, who have lacked invention except around a skeleton ready furnished.  What was true of Keats and Fitzgerald cannot nullify the merit of Barham.  His fancy erected a huge and consistent superstructure on a very slender foundation.  The same materials lay ready to the hands of thousands of others, who, however, saw only stupid monkish fables or dull country superstition.

His own explanation of his handling of the church legends tickles a critic’s sense of humor almost as much as the verses themselves.  It is true that while differing utterly in his tone of mind, and his attitude toward the mediaeval stories, from that of the mediaeval artists and sculptors,—­whose gargoyles and other grotesques were carved without a thought of travesty on anything religious,—­he is at one with them in combining extreme irreverence of form with a total lack of irreverence of spirit toward the real spiritual mysteries of religion.  He burlesques saints and devils alike, mocks the swarm of miracles of the mediaeval Church, makes salient all the ludicrous aspects of mediaeval religious faith in its devout credulity and barbarous gropings; yet he never sneers at holiness or real aspiration, and through all the riot of fun in his masques, one feels the sincere Christian and the warm-hearted man.  But he was evidently troubled by the feeling that a clergyman ought not to ridicule any form in which religious feeling had ever clothed itself; and he justified himself by professing that he wished to expose the absurdity of old superstitions and mummeries to help countervail the effect of the Oxford movement.  Ingoldsby as a soldier of Protestantism, turning monkish stories into rollicking farces in order to show up what he conceived to be the errors of his opponents, is as truly Ingoldsbian a figure as any in his own ‘Legends.’  Yet one need not accuse him of hypocrisy or falsehood, hardly even of self-deception.  He felt that dead superstitions, and stories not reverenced even by the Church that developed them, were legitimate material for any use he could make of them; he felt that in dressing them up with his wit and fancy he was harming nothing that existed, nor making any one look lightly on the religion of Christ or the Church of Christ:  and that they were the property of an opposing church body was a happy thought to set his conscience at rest.  He wrote them thenceforth with greater peace of mind and added satisfaction, and no doubt really believed that he was doing good in the way he alleged.  And if the excuse gave to the world even one more of the inimitable ‘Legends,’ it was worth feeling and making.