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