weaknesses and the dilemmas of Hypatia, on the other hand it is not so brilliant or so rich with interest.  But it has real and lasting qualities.  The Devon coast scenery which Kingsley knew and loved, the West Indian and tropical scenery, which he loved but did not know, are both painted with wonderful force of imaginative colour.  When one recalls all that Kingsley has done in the landscape of romance,—­Alexandria and the desert of the Nile, West Indian jungles and rivers, Bideford Bay, his own heaths in Yeast, the fever-dens of London in Alton Locke,—­one is almost inclined to rank him in this single gift of description as first of all the novelists since Scott.  Compared with the brilliancy and variety of Kingsley’s pictures of country, Bulwer’s and Disraeli’s are conventional; even those of Dickens are but local; Thackeray and Trollope have no interest in landscape at all; George Eliot’s keen interest is not so spontaneous as Kingsley’s, and Charlotte Bronte’s wonderful gift is strictly limited to the narrow field of her own experience.  But Kingsley, as a landscape painter, can image to us other continents and many zones, and he carries us to distant climates with astonishing force of reality.

Two Years Ago has some vigorous scenes, but it has neither the merits nor the defects of Kingsley in historical romance.  Its scene is too near for his fine imagination to work poetically, and it is too much of a sermon and pamphlet to be worth a second, or a third reading; and as to Hereward the Wake, I must confess to not having been able to complete even a first reading, and that after sundry trials.  Of Kingsley’s remaining fanciful pieces it is enough to say that The Heroes still remains, after forty years, the child’s introduction to Greek mythology, and is still the best book of its class.  When we compare it with another attempt by a romancer of genius, and set it beside the sticky dulness of The Tanglewood Tales, it looks like a group of real Tanagra figurines placed beside a painted plaster cast.  Kingsley’s Heroes, in spite of the inevitable sermon addressed in the preface to all good boys and girls, has the real simplicity of Greek art, and the demi-gods tell their myths in noble and pure English. The Water Babies is an immortal bit of fun, which will be read in the next century with Gulliver and The Ring and the Rose, long after we have all forgotten the nonsensical whims about science and the conventional pulpit moralising which Kingsley scattered broadcast into everything he said or wrote.