marriage and celibacy; from his regard for freedom of thought; and from that distrust and contempt of Popish priestcraft which involved him in his controversy with Newman.  “The Middle Age,” says the Introduction, “was, in the gross, a coarse, barbarous, and profligate age. . . .  It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the time which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the mediaeval saints. . . .  So rough and common a life-picture of the Middle Age will, I am afraid, whether faithful or not, be far from acceptable to those who take their notions of that period principally from such exquisite dreams as the fictions of Fouque, and of certain moderns whose graceful minds . . . are, on account of their very sweetness and simplicity, singularly unfitted to convey any true likeness of the coarse and stormy Middle Age. . . .  But really, time enough has been lost in ignorant abuse of that period, and time enough also, lately, in blind adoration of it.  When shall we learn to see it as it was?”

Polemic in its purpose and anti-Catholic in temper, “The Saint’s Tragedy” then seeks to dispel the glamour which romance had thrown over mediaeval life.  Kingsley’s Middle Age is not the holy Middle Age of the German “throne-and-altar” men; nor yet the picturesque Middle Age of Walter Scott.  It is the cruel, ignorant, fanatical Middle Age of “The Amber Witch” and “The Succube.”  But Kingsley was too much of a poet not to feel those “last enchantments” which whispered to Arnold from Oxford towers, maugre his “strong sense of the irrationality of that period.”  The saintly, as well as the human side, of Elizabeth’s character is portrayed with sympathy, though poetically the best thing in the drama are the songs of the Crusaders.

Kingsley, in effect, was always good at a ballad.  His finest work in this kind is modern, “The Last Buccaneer,” “The Sands of Dee,” “The Three Fishers,” and the like.  But there are the same fire and swing in many of his romantic ballads on historical or legendary subjects, such as “The Swan-Neck,” “The Red King,” “Ballad of Earl Haldan’s Daughter,” “The Song of the Little Baltung,” and a dozen more.  Without the imaginative witchery of Coleridge, Keats, and Rossetti, in the ballad of action Kingsley ranks very close to Scott.  The same manly delight in outdoor life and bold adventure, love of the old Teutonic freedom and strong feeling of English nationality inspire his historical romances, only one of which, however, “Hereward the Wake” (1866), has to do with the period of the Middle Ages.

[1] “It is almost superfluous to mention that the appellation ‘Childe,’ as ‘Childe Waters,’ ‘Childe Childers,’ etc., is used as more consonant with the old structure of versification which I have adopted.”—­Preface to “Childe Harold.”  Byron appeals to a letter of Beattie relating to “The Minstrel,” to justify his choice of the stanza.