There is something eminently depressing about Keble's want of personal ambition; no doubt, it was a triumph of grace over nature; but one would have liked the triumph to have been a little more impressive. In the celebrated canvass for the Provostship of Oriel, where the decision of Newman and Pusey turned the scale, and gave it to Hawkins rather than Keble, it is evident that Keble was not greatly disappointed; he acquiesced too easily. In some men, this could almost be called indolence, but in Keble we may call it modesty. It argues, however, a certain want of fire, of intensity--and the same is the case with his writings. Keble never _lets himself go_; he is always checking and controlling the impulse of song. And thus he spoke of his own poetry as a relief from graver thoughts: "Poeticæ vis medica," the healing power of poetry, he called it; as something to which he could turn to distract and soothe him, but a πἁρεργον nevertheless, not the business of his life, not an overmastering impulse, an imperious need of self-expression. This did not lead to the careful chastening and correcting of his verse that one might expect. There have been poets, in whom the sense of perfection was very strong, like Gray, who worked rarely, slowly, painfully, producing a marvellous, jewelled masterpiece, wrought out touch by touch. But there was nothing of this about Keble; he was copious, fluent, uncritical; he was never fastidious, and allowed much to go out under his name which was quite unworthy of an able man; puerile, inelegant stuff; no one, we may say, was ever capable of more extreme flatness than Keble reached in some of the poems in the _Lyra Innocentium_; such as the compositions entitled "Irreverence in Church," and "Disrespect to Elders," where it is asked that some good angel may wait, "With unseen scourge in hand, On the Church path, and by the low school door," in order to "write in young hearts Thy reverend lore,"--very advisable, no doubt, but how suggestive of Bumble, and the charity children, and the rod of office! A sense of propriety, we will not say of humour, would have prevented such a bathos as this.