[25] It is curious to compare this (dealing as it does largely with sport) and the “Jorrocks” series of Robert Surtees (1803-1864).  Kingsley was nearly as practical a sportsman as Surtees:  but Surtees’s characters and manners have the old artificial-picaresque quality only.

Hypatia—­which succeeded after some interval (1853) and when the writer’s Christian Socialist, Churchman-Chartist excitement had somewhat clarified itself—­is a more substantial, a more ambitious, but certainly also an even more successful book.  It has something of—­and perhaps, though in far transposed matter, owes something to—­Esmond in its daring blend of old and new, and it falls short of that wonderful creation.  But it is almost a second to it:  and, with plenty of faults, is perhaps the only classical or semi-classical novel of much value in English.

But it was in the next year, 1854, that Kingsley’s work reached its greatest perfection in the brilliant historical novel of Westward Ho! where the glories of Elizabethan adventure and patriotism were treated with a wonderful kindred enthusiasm, with admirable narrative faculty, with a creation of character, suitable for the purpose, which is hardly inferior to that of the greatest masters, and with an even enhanced and certainly chastened exercise of the descriptive faculty above noticed.  The book to some extent invited—­and Kingsley availed himself of the opportunity in a far more than sufficient degree—­that “coat-trailing” which, as has been said, inevitably in its turn provokes “coat-treading”:  and it has been abused from various quarters.  But that it is one of the very greatest of English novels next to the few supreme, impartial and competent criticism will never hesitate to allow.  Of his remaining books of novel kind one was of the “eccentric” variety:  the others, though full of good things, were perhaps on the whole failures.  The first referred to (the second in order of appearance), The Water Babies (1863), is a half Rabelaisian though perfectly inoffensive fatrasie of all sorts of things, exceedingly delightful to fit tastes.  But Two Tears Ago (1857), though containing some fine and even really exquisite things, shows a relaxing hand on the crudity and promiscuousness which had been excusable in his two first books and had been well restrained in Hypatia and Westward Ho! by central and active interests of story and character.  “Spasmodic” poetry, the Crimean War, Pre-Raphaelitism, Tractarianism, the good and bad sides of science, and divers other things make a mixture that is not sufficiently concocted and “rectified.”  While in the much later Hereward the Wake (1866), though the provocation offered to the Dryasdust kind of historian is no matter, there is a curious relapse on the old fault of incorporating too much history or pseudo-history, and the same failure as in Two Tears Ago, or perhaps a greater one in degree, to concoct the story (which is little more than a chronicle) together with a certain neglect to conciliate the sympathies of the reader.  But the whole batch is a memorable collection; and it shows, rather exceptionally, the singular originality and variety of the novel at this time.