In any estimate of Hypatia as a romance, it is right to consider the curious tangle of difficulties which Kingsley crowded into his task.  It was to be a realistic historical novel dated in an age of which the public knew nothing, set in a country of which the author had no experience, but which many of us know under wholly altered conditions.  It was to carry on controversies as to the older and the later types of Christianity, as to Polytheism, Judaism, and Monotheism; it was to confute Romanism, Scepticism, and German metaphysics; it was to denounce celibacy and monasticism, to glorify muscular Christianity, to give glowing pictures of Greek sensuousness and Roman rascality, and finally to secure the apotheosis of Scandinavian heroism.  And in spite of these incongruous and incompatible aims, the story still remains a vivid and fascinating tale.  That makes it a real tour de force.  It is true that it has many of the faults of Bulwer, a certain staginess, melodramatic soliloquies, careless incongruities, crude sensationalism—­but withal, it has some of the merits of Bulwer at his best, in The Last Days of Pompeii, Riensi, The Last of the Barons,—­the play of human passion and adventure, intensity of reproduction however inaccurate in detail; it has “go,” intelligibility, memorability.  The characters interest us, the scenes amuse us, the pictures are not forgotten.  The stately beauty of Hypatia, the seductive fascination of Pelagia, the childlike nature of Philammon, the subtle cynicism of Raphael Aben-Ezra, the mighty audacity of the Goths, the fanaticism of Cyril, and the strange clash of three elements of civilisation,—­Graeco-Roman, Christian, Teutonic—­give us definite impressions, leave a permanent imprint on our thoughts.  There are extravagances, theatricalities, impossibilities enough.  The Gothic princes comport themselves like British seamen ashore in Suez or Bombay; Raphael talks like young Lancelot Smith in Yeast; Hypatia is a Greek Argemone; and Bishop Synesius is merely an African fifth-century Charles Kingsley, what Sydney Smith called a “squarson,” or compound of squire and parson.  Still, after all—­bating grandiloquences and incongruities and “errors excepted,” Hypatia lives, moves, and speaks to us; and, in the matter of vitality and interest, is amongst the very few successes in historical romance in the whole Victorian literature.

West-ward Ho! shares with Hypatia the merit of being a successful historical romance.  It is free from many of the faults of Hypatia, it is more mature, more carefully written.  It is not laden with the difficulties of Hypatia; it is only in part an historical romance at all; the English scenery is placed in a country which Kingsley knew perfectly and from boyhood; and the only controversy involved was the interminable debate about Jesuit mendacity and Romanist priestcraft.  So that, if Westward Ho! does not present us with the