Jean Ingelow may be said to have begun her study of the art of writing child-rhymes and the tales that are akin to them under Jane and Ann Taylor. In middle life she came to live in London, and she wrote of the city and its shifting and unending throng; but her best pages are those, whether verse or prose, that reflect the things of the seashore and waterside, the “empty sky,” the “world of heather,” which she knew as a child in Lincolnshire and Essex. Ipswich, Filey Brig in Yorkshire, and other places are to be counted in her own history; and some of the memories that are a picture of her early days may be found in her long story Off the Skelligs, where she sketches her birthplace, and the house by the wharves, with a room in the rooftree overlooking the ships and a long reach of the river.

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