narrative:  but if it can be compared for one moment with Amyas Leigh’s quest of the Great Galleon then I am no judge of narrative.  The one point—­and it is an important one—­in which Henry beats Charles as an artist is his sustained vivacity.  Charles soars far higher at times; but Charles is often profoundly dull.  Now, in all Henry’s books I have not found a single dull page.  He may be trivial, inconsequent, irrelevant, absurd; but he never wearies.  It is a great merit:  but it is not enough in itself to place a novelist even in the second rank.  In a short sketch of Henry Kingsley, contributed by his nephew, Mr. Maurice Kingsley, to Messrs. Scribner’s paper, The Bookbuyer, I find that the younger brother was considered at home “undoubtedly the novelist of the family; the elder being more of the poet, historian, and prophet.”  (Prophet!) “My father only wrote one novel pure and simple—­viz. Two Years Ago—­his other works being either historical novels or ’signs of the times.’” Now why an “historical novel” should not be a “novel pure and simple,” and what kind of literary achievement a “sign of the times” may be, I leave the reader to guess.  The whole passage seems to suggest a certain confusion in the Kingsley family with regard to the fundamental divisions of literature.  And it seems clear that the Kingsley family considered novel-writing “pure and simple”—­in so far as they differentiated this from other kinds of novel-writing—­to be something not entirely respectable.

Their opinion of Henry Kingsley in particular is indicated in no uncertain manner.  In Mrs. Charles Kingsley’s life of her husband, Henry’s existence is completely ignored.  The briefest biographical note was furnished forth for Mr. Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography:  and Mr. Stephen dismisses our author with a few curt lines.  This disposition to treat Henry as an awful warning and nothing more, while sleek Charles is patted on the back for a saint, inclines one to take up arms on the other side and assert, with Mr. Shorter, that “when time has softened his memory for us, the public interest in Henry Kingsley will be stronger than in his now more famous brother.”  But can we look forward to this reversal of the public verdict?  Can we consent with it if it ever comes?  The most we can hope is that future generations will read Henry Kingsley, and will love him in spite of his faults.

Henry, the third son of the Rev. Charles Kingsley, was born in Northamptonshire on the 2nd of January, 1830, his brother Charles being then eleven years old.  In 1836 his father became rector of St. Luke’s Church, Chelsea—­the church of which such effective use is made in The Hillyars and the Burtons—­and his boyhood was passed in that famous old suburb.  He was educated at King’s College School and Worcester College, Oxford, where he became a famous oarsman, rowing bow of his College boat; also bow of a famous light-weight University “four,” which swept everything