The essays which he contributed to The Family Herald were therefore adjusted to the note which every week was sounded by his innumerable correspondents.  He was in touch with his public.  He did not write above their heads.  His contributions were eminently readable, bright, sensible, and interesting.  He always had something to say, and he said it, as was his wont, crisply, deftly, and well.  And through the chinks and crevices of the smoothly written essay you catch every now and then glimpses of the Northumbrian genius whose life burnt itself out at the early age of thirty-nine.

For James Runciman was anything but a smug, smooth, sermonical essayist.  He was a Berserker of the true Northern breed, whose fiery soul glowed none the less fiercely because he wore a large soft hat instead of the Viking’s helmet and wielded a pen rather than sword or spear.  Like the war-horse in Job, he smelled the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting.  His soul rejoiced in conflict, in the storm and the stress of the struggle both of nature and of man.  It was born in his blood, and what was lacking at birth came to him in the north-easter which hurled the waves of the Northern Sea in unavailing fury against the Northumbrian coast.  He lived at a tension too great to be maintained without incessant stimulus.  It was an existence like that of the heroes of Valhalla, who recruited at night the energies dissipated in the battles of the day by quaffing bumpers of inexhaustible mead.  In these essays we have the Berserker in his milder moods, his savagery all laid aside, with but here and there a glint, as of sun-ray on harness, to remind us of the sinking in the glory and pride of his strength.

The essays abound with traces of that consummate mastery of English which distinguished all his writings.  He, better than any man of our time, could use such subtle magic of woven words as to make the green water of the ocean surge and boil into white foam on the printed page.  As befitted a dweller on the north-east coast, he passionately loved the sea.  The sea and the sky are the two exits by which dwellers in the slums of Deptford and in North Shields can escape from the inferno of life.  He was a close observer of nature and of men.  In his pictures of life in the depths he was a grim and uncompromising realist, who, however, was kept from pessimism by his faith in good women and his knowledge of worse men in the past than even “the Squire” and the valet-keeping prize-fighters of our time.

There was a sensible optimism about James Runciman, Conservative though he styled himself,—­although there are probably few who would suspect that from such an essay as the bitter description of English life in “Quiet Old Towns” or his lamentation over the unequal distribution of wealth.  His sympathy with the suffering of the poor—­of the real poor—­was a constant passion, and he showed it quite as much by his somewhat Carlylean denunciation of the reprobate as by his larger advocacy of measures that seemed to him best calculated to prevent the waste of child-life.