The later are mannered caricatures of the earlier, without their soul; and the same change seems to have passed over him which (with Mr.Ruskin's pardon) transformed the Turner of 1820 into the Turner of 1850.
Thus had Elsley transferred what sympathy he had left from needle-women and ragged schools, dwellers in Jacob's Island and sleepers in the dry arches of Waterloo Bridge, to sufferers of a more poetic class.

Whether his sympathies showed thereby that he had risen or fallen, let my readers decide each for himself.

It is a credit to any man to feel for any human being; and Italy, as she is at this moment, is certainly one of the most tragic spectacles which the world has ever seen.

Elsley need not be blamed for pitying her; only for holding, with most of our poets, a vague notion that her woes were to be cured by a hair of the dog who bit her; viz., by homoeopathic doses of that same "art" which has been all along her morbid and self-deceiving substitute for virtue and industry.

So, as she had sung herself down to the nether pit, Elsley would help to sing her up again; and had already been throwing off, ever since 1848, a series of sonnets which he entitled Eurydice, intimating, of course, that he acted as the Orpheus.