mons, _Alton Locke_ and _At Last_.
But they can and they do show it in part: and it gives them
the interest which has been noticed in other cases. Indeed
in one respect--as a writer--Kingsley is perhaps better in
his letters than in his _Essays_, where he too often affects
a Macaulayesque positiveness on rather inadequate grounds.
The following specimen should show him in pleasantly varied
character--as a thoroughly human person, a good sportsman,
and what Matthew Arnold (by no means himself very liberal of
praise to his literary contemporaries) thought him--"the
most generous man [he had] ever known; the most forward to
praise, the most willing to admire, the most free from all
thought of himself in praising and admiring and the most
incapable of being made ill-natured by having to support
ill-natured attacks upon himself." It is to be feared that
Mr. Arnold did not go far wrong when he declared, "Among men
of letters I know nothing so rare as this."

It is true that the author of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ was
an intimate personal friend, and in politics and other
things a close comrade of Kingsley's; but he was as generous
to others, and while the scars of the battle with Newman
were almost fresh, he writes that he has read _The Dream of
Gerontius_ "with admiration and awe." [Greek: thymos], in
this sense = "spirit." "Jaques" = "Jack" = "Pike," while on
the other side we get, through him of _As You Like It_, an
explanation of "melancholies." And in fact the pike is not a
cheerful-looking fish. Even two whom the present writer once
saw tugging at the two ends of one dead trout in a shallow,
did it sulkily.

52. TO TOM HUGHES, ESQ.

Jan. 12. 1857.

I have often been minded to write to you about 'Tom Brown.' I have
puffed it everywhere I went, but I soon found how true the adage is that
good wine needs no bush, for every one had read it already, and from
every one, from the fine lady on her throne to the red-coat on his
cock-horse and the school-boy on his forrum (as our Irish brethren call
it), I have heard but one word, and that is, that it is the jolliest
book they ever read. Among a knot of red-coats at the cover-side, some
very fast fellow said, 'If I had had such a book in my boyhood, I should
have been a better man now!' and more than one capped his sentiment
frankly.