In this series of papers I have been trying to note some of the more definite literary forces which tended to mould English opinion during the epoch of the present Queen.  I can remember the issue of nearly all the greater products of the Victorian writers, or at least the heyday of their early fame.  I do not speak of any living writer, and confine myself to the writers of our country.  Much less do I permit myself to speak of those living lights of literature from whom we may yet receive work even surpassing that of those who are gone.  My aim has been not so much to weigh each writer in the delicate balance of mere literary merit, but rather, from the point of view of the historian of ideas and of manners, to record the successive influences which, in the last fifty years or so, have moulded or reflected English opinion through printed books, be they of the dogmatic or of the imaginative order.  In so doing, I have to speak of writers whose vogue is passing away with the present generation, or those of whom we must admit very grave defects and feebleness.  Some of them may be little cared for to-day; though they have a place in the evolution of British society and thought.

Charles Kingsley has such a place—­not by reason of any supreme work or any very rare quality of his own, but by virtue of his versatility, his verve, his fecundity, his irrepressible gift of breaking out in some new line, his strong and reckless sympathy, and above all by real literary brilliance.  Where he failed to impress, to teach, to inspire—­almost even though he stirred men to anger or laughter—­Charles Kingsley for a generation continued to interest the public, to scatter amongst them ideas or problems; he made many people think, and gave many people delight.  He woke them up in all sorts of ways, about all sorts of things.  He wrote lyrics, songs, dramas, romances, sermons, Platonic dialogues, newspaper articles, children’s fairy books, scientific manuals, philosophical essays, lectures, extravaganzas, and theological polemics.  Hardly any of these were quite in the first rank, and some of them were thin, flashy, and almost silly.  But most of them had the saving gift of getting home to the interests, ideas, and tastes of the great public, and he made them think even when he was very wrong himself.  Such activity, such keenness, such command of literary resources, has to be reckoned with in a man of warm feeling and generous impulses; and thus, if Charles Kingsley is no longer with very many either prophet or master, he was a literary influence of at least the second rank in his own generation.