success, victorious success, sufficient indeed to gladden the
heart even of Dr. Smiles--success in the way of Church
preferment, success in the way of public veneration, success,
above all, as a popular novelist, poet, and preacher. Canon
Kingsley's life has been written in two substantial volumes
containing abundant letters and no indiscretions. In this
biography the name of Henry Kingsley is absolutely ignored. And
yet it is not too much to say that, when time has softened his
memory for us, as it has softened for us the memories of Marlowe
and Burns and many another, the public interest in Henry Kingsley
will be stronger than in his now more famous brother."[A]


A prejudice confessed.

I almost wish I could believe this. If one cannot get rid of a
prejudice, the wisest course is to acknowledge it candidly: and
therefore I confess myself as capable of jumping over the moon as of
writing fair criticism on Charles or Henry Kingsley. As for Henry, I
worshipped his books as a boy; to-day I find them full of
faults--often preposterous, usually ill-constructed, at times
unnatural beyond belief. John Gilpin never threw the Wash about on
both sides of the way more like unto a trundling mop or a wild goose
at play than did Henry Kingsley the decent flow of fiction when the
mood was on him. His notion of constructing a novel was to take equal
parts of wooden melodrama and low comedy and stick them boldly
together in a paste of impertinent drollery and serious but entirely
irrelevant moralizing. And yet each time I read _Ravenshoe_--and I
must be close upon "double figures"--I like it better. Henry did my
green unknowing youth engage, and I find it next to impossible to give