Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

IRISH LITERARY MEN. 479
much applause and a steady little thread of income,
no doubt ever welcome in addition to the small
revenue of the curacy or vicarage which they held,
neither of them attaining any preferment of import-
ance during the greater part of their lives. Gleig in-
deed received the dignified post of Chaplain-General
at the end of his, but Croly never got anything greater
than a church in the City—St Stephen's, Walbrook
where his incumbency was passed in a hand-to-hand
fight with churchwardens and vestrymen in the inter-
ests of the public and the poor. He was an Irishman,
as so many of the literary men of the period were, and
still are, with that gift of fluency, often rising to elo-
quence, sometimes dropping into mere rhetoric, which
is the special gift of his race. And he was not much
less of an adventurer than his early friend Maginn,
and flung himself, like that dashing and brilliant but
unfortunate son of the Muses, upon the great world of
London, with prospects no more certain and gifts less
dazzling—although in Holy Orders, and not unmind-
ful of the special topics of his profession. Here he held
a certain place by continued exertion, and an industry
which perhaps is the last thing for which the profes-
sor of literature cares to be distinguished, but which,
in the case of such a literary man-of-all-work as Croly,
is often the utmost that can be said,—his best work,
with its excellent level of talent and its flashes of fine
perception, being buried in the endless stores of the
' Magazine,' gaining indeed their meed of admiration
at the moment, but thereafter indistinguishable from
the general mass, except by the special student. Croly,
like all the rest, was most anxious to remain anony-
mous. "You are quite right," he says, "in keeping
—