CROLY, George (1785-1860), a distinguished literary divine of the Church of England, was born in Dublin about 1785, and received his education at Trinity College there. Croly, although a staunch unbending Tory, owed to Lord Brougham his promotion to the living of St Stephen’s, Walbrook, London. The appointment conferred honour on Brougham, as the presentee was a keen partisan, and had zealously served his political friends with his pen. He was neglected by the Tories very much as Sydney Smith was by the Whigs. Croly was a great pulpit orator, and continued, not unworthily, the illustrious school of Irish eloquence, which boasts such names as Burke, Sheridan, and Grattan. He was also a ripe classical scholar, and in early life showed no common aptitude for music. He died on November 24, 1860. Croly was a man of restless energy, and won laurels in many fields. It is as a literary man, however, that he claims attention. And here the first thing that strikes us is his extraordinary versatility. Poems, biographies, dramas, sermons, novels, satires, magazine articles, newspaper leaders, and theological works were dashed off by his facile pen; and, according to Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, he was great in conversation. While a young man, Croly wrote dramatic criticism for a short-lived paper called the New Times. His genuine satiric vein was seen in one of his earliest works, The Times, and in one of his latest, the Modern Orlando, which appeared in 1854. His poems were first issued in a collected form by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, in 1830. The principal are— Paris in 1815, which embodies a description of the works of art then to be found in the Louvre; The Angel of the World, an Arabian tale; a collection of short poems, with corresponding engravings, entitled Gems ...