performance in prose.  It is more a work of art than Alton Locke, for it is much shorter, less akin to journalism, less spasmodic, and more full of poetry. Yeast deals with the country—­which Kingsley knew better and loved more than he did the town.  It deals with real, permanent, deep social evils, and it paints no fancy portrait of the labourer, the squire, the poacher, or the village parson.  Kingsley there speaks of what he knew, and he describes that which he felt with the soul of a poet.  The hunting scenes in Yeast, the river vignettes, the village revel, are exquisite pieces of painting.  And the difficulties overcome in the book are extreme.  To fuse together a Platonic Dialogue and a Carlyle latter-day pamphlet, and to mould this compound into a rural romance in the style of Silas Marner, heightened with extracts from University Pulpit sermons, with some ringing ballads, and political diatribes in the vein of Cobbett’s appeals to the People—­this was to show wonderful literary versatility and animation.  And, after forty-five years, Yeast can be read and re-read still!

Alton Locke was no doubt more popular, more passionately in earnest, more definite and intelligible than Yeast; and if I fail to hold it quite as the equal of Yeast in literary merit, it is because these very qualities necessarily impair it as a work of art.  It was written, we well know, under violent excitement and by a terrible strain on the neuropathic organism of the poet-preacher.  It is undoubtedly spasmodic, crude, and disorderly.  A generation which has grown fastidious on the consummate finish of Esmond, Romola, and Treasure Island, is a little critical of the hasty outpourings of spirit which satisfied our fathers in the forties, after the manner of Sybil, the Last of the Barons, or Barnaby Rudge.  The Tennysonian modulation of phrase had not yet been popularised in prose, and spasmodic soliloquies and melodramatic eloquence did not offend men so cruelly as they offend us now.

As Yeast was inspired by Sartor Resartus, so Alton Locke was inspired by Carlyle’s French Revolution.  The effect of Carlyle upon Kingsley is plain enough throughout, down to the day when Carlyle led Kingsley to approve the judicial murder of negroes in Jamaica.  Kingsley himself tells us, by the mouth of Alton Locke (chap. ix.), “I know no book, always excepting Milton, which at once so quickened and exalted my poetical view of man and his history, as that great prose poem, the single epic of modern days, Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution.”  Kingsley’s three masters were—­in poetry, Tennyson; in social philosophy, Carlyle; in things moral and spiritual, Frederick D. Maurice.  He had far more of genius than had Maurice; he was a much more passionate reformer than Tennyson; he was far more genial and social than Carlyle.  Not that he imitated any of the three. Yeast is not at all copied from Sartor, either in form or in thought; nor is Alton Locke in any sense imitated from the French Revolution.  It is inspired by it; but Yeast and Alton Locke are entirely original, and were native outbursts from Kingsley’s own fierce imagination and intense human sympathy.