A talk about the influence of the Oxford writers came next:  on this subject I knew we should not agree, though of course it was interesting to me to hear Mr. Kingsley’s opinion.  He spoke with some asperity of one or two of the leaders, though his chief objection was to certain young men who had put themselves forward as champions of the movement.  Of Mr. Keble he spoke very kindly.  He said he had at one time been much under the influence of these writings.  I mentioned Alexander Knox as being perhaps the forerunner of the Oxford men.  “Ah,” he said, “I owe my knowledge of that good man to Mrs. Kingsley:  you must talk with her about him.”  We joined the party in the drawing-room, and there was some further conversation on this subject.

At about ten o’clock the bell was rung, the servants came in, prayers were said, and the ladies (Mrs. Kingsley and their daughter’s governess) bid us good-night.  Then to Mr. Kingsley’s study, where the rest of the evening was spent—­from half-past ten to half-past twelve—­the pipe went on, and the talk—­a continuous flow.  Quakerism was a subject.  George Fox, Kingsley said, was his admiration:  he read his Journal constantly—­thought him one of the most remarkable men that age produced.  He liked his hostility to Calvinism.  “How little that fellow Macaulay,” he said, “could understand Quakerism!  A man needs to have been in Inferno himself to know what the Quakers meant in what they said and did.”  He referred me to an article of his on Jacob Boehme and the mystic writers, in which he had given his views in regard to Fox.

We talked about his parish work:  he found it, he said, a great help to him, adding emphatically that his other labor was secondary to this.  He had trained himself not to be annoyed by his people calling on him when he was writing.  If he was to be their priest, he must see them when it suited them to come; and he had become able if called off from his writing to go on again the moment he was alone.  I asked him when he wrote.  He said in the morning almost always:  sometimes, when much pushed, he had written for an hour in the evening, but he always had to correct largely the next morning work thus done.  Daily exercise, riding, hunting, together with parish work, were necessary to keep him in a condition for writing:  he aimed to keep himself in rude health.  I asked whether Alton Locke had been written in that room.  “Yes,” he said—­“from four to eight in the mornings; and a young man was staying with me at the time with whom every day I used to ride, or perhaps hunt, when my task of writing was done.”

A fine copy of St. Augustine attracted my attention on his shelves—­five volumes folio bound in vellum.  “Ah,” he said, “that is a treasure I must show you;” and taking down a volume he turned to the fly-leaf, where were the words “Charles Kingsley from Thomas Carlyle,” and above them “Thomas Carlyle from John Sterling.”  One could understand that Carlyle had thus handed on the book, notwithstanding its sacred associations, knowing that to Kingsley it would have a threefold value.  My eye caught also a relic of curious interest—­a fragment from one of the vessels of the Spanish Armada.  It lay on the mantelpiece:  I could well understand Kingsley’s pleasure in possessing it.