I have dwelt last and most seriously upon Kingsley’s earliest books, because they were in many respects his most powerful, his typical works.  As he grew in years, he did not develop.  He improved for a time in literary form, but his excitable nerve-system, his impulsive imagination, drove him into tasks for which he had no gift, and where he floated hither and thither without sure guide.  From the time of his official success, that is, for the last fifteen years of his life, he produced nothing worthy of himself, and much that was manifest book-making—­the mere outpouring of the professional preacher and story-teller.  Of his historical and philosophical work I shall not speak at all.  His shallow Cambridge Inaugural Lecture, given by him as Professor of History, was torn to pieces in the Westminster Review (vol. xix. p. 305, April 1861), it is said, by a brother Professor of History.  Much less need we speak of his miserable duel with Cardinal Newman, wherein he was so shamefully worsted.  For fifteen years he poured out lectures, sermons, tales, travels, poems, dialogues, children’s books, and historical, philosophical, theological, social, scientific, and sanitary essays—­but the Charles Kingsley of Yeast, of Alton Locke, of Hypatia, of Westward Ho! of the Ballads and Poems, we never knew again.  He burnt out his fiery spirit at last, at the age of fifty-five, in a series of restless enterprises, and a vehement outpouring of miscellaneous eloquence.

Charles Kingsley was a man of genius, half poet, half controversialist.  The two elements did not blend altogether well.  His poetic passion carried away his reason and often confused his logic.  His argumentative vehemence too often marred his fine imagination.  Thus his Saint’s Tragedy is partly a satire on Romanism, and his ballad in Yeast is mainly a radical pamphlet.  Hardly one of his books is without a controversial preface, controversial titles, chapters, or passages on questions of theology, churches, races, politics, or society.  Indeed, excepting some of his poems, and some of his popular or children’s books (but not even all of these), all his works are of a controversial kind.  Whatever he did he did with heart, and this was at once his merit and his weakness.  Before all things, he was a preacher, a priest of the English Church, a Christian minister.  He was, indeed, a liberal priest, sometimes even too free and easy.  He brings in the sacred name perhaps more often than any other writer, and he does so not always in a devout way.  He seemed at last to use the word “God” as if it were an expletive or mere intensive like a Greek ge [gamma epsilon], meaning “very much” or “very good,” as where he so oddly calls the North-East wind “the wind of God.”  And he betrays a most unclerical interest in physical torture and physical voluptuousness (Hypatia, The Saint’s Tragedy, Saint Maura, Westward Ho!), though it is true that his real nature is both eminently manly and pure.