As we have done all through these estimates of great writers, we have to take the great writer at his best and forget his worst.  It is a melancholy reflection that we so often find a man of genius working himself out to an unworthy close, it is too often feared, in the thirst of success and even the attraction of gain.  But at his best Charles Kingsley left some fine and abiding influences behind him, and achieved some brilliant things.  Would that we always had men of his dauntless spirit, of his restless energy, of his burning sympathy, of his keen imagination!  He reminds us somewhat of his own Bishop Synesius, as described in Hypatia (chap. xxi.), who “was one of those many-sided, volatile, restless men, who taste joy and sorrow, if not deeply or permanently, yet abundantly and passionately”—­“He lived . . . in a whirlwind of good deeds, meddling and toiling for the mere pleasure of action; and as soon as there was nothing to be done, which, till lately, had happened seldom enough with him, paid the penalty for past excitement in fits of melancholy.  A man of magniloquent and flowery style, not without a vein of self-conceit; yet withal of overflowing kindliness, racy humour, and unflinching courage, both physical and moral; with a very clear practical faculty, and a very muddy speculative one”—­and so on.  Charles Kingsley must have been thinking of his own tastes when he drew the portrait of the “squire-bishop.”  But he did more than the Bishop of Cyrene, and was himself a compound of squire-parson-poet.  And in all three characters he showed some of the best sides of each.

[1] Amongst other difficulties it may be observed that such words as “and,” “is,” “are,” “the,” “who,” “his,” “its,” “have,” “been”—­words without which few English sentences can be constructed—­do not form the short syllables of a true dactyl.

IX

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

Some of our younger friends who read the name which heads this essay may incline to think that it ought to be very short indeed, nay, be limited to a single remark; and, like the famous chapter on the snakes in Iceland, it should simply run—­that Anthony Trollope has no place at all in Victorian literature.  We did not think so in England in the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies, in the heyday of Victorian romance; and I do not think we ought to pass that judgment now in this last quinquennium of our century.  I shall have to put our friend Anthony in a very moderate and prosaic rank; I shall not conceal my sense of his modest claims and conspicuous faults, of his prolixity, his limited sphere, his commonplace.  But in view of the enormous popularity he once enjoyed, of the space he filled for a whole generation, I cannot altogether omit him from these studies of the Victorian writers.