.
Perhaps he even grins over Amyas "burying alternately his face in the
pasty and the pasty in his face," or he tries to feel diverted by the
Elizabethan waggeries of Frank. But there is no fun in them--they are
mechanical; they are worse than the humours of Scott's Sir Percy Shafto,
which are not fine.

The same sense of everything not being quite so excellent as one
remembered it haunts one in "Hereward the Wake, the Last of the English."
Kingsley calls him "the Last of the English," but he is really the first
of the literary Vikings. In the essay on the Sagas here I have tried to
show, very imperfectly, what the Norsemen were actually like. They
caught Kingsley's fancy, and his "Hereward," though born on English soil,
is really Norse--not English. But Kingsley did not write about the
Vikings, nor about his Elizabethan heroes in "Westward Ho!" in a
perfectly simple, straightforward way. He was always thinking of our own
times and referring to them. That is why even the rather ruffianly
Hereward is so great an enemy of saints and monks. That is why, in
"Hypatia" (which opens so well), we have those prodigiously dull, stupid,
pedantic, and conceited reflections of Raphael Ben Ezra. That is why, in
all Kingsley's novels, he is perpetually exciting himself in defence of
marriage and the family life, as if any monkish ideas about the
blessedness of bachelorhood were ever likely to drive the great Anglo-
Saxon race into convents and monasteries. That is the very last thing we
have to be afraid of; but Kingsley was afraid of it, and was eternally
attacking everything Popish and monkish.

Boys and young people, then, can read "Westward Ho!" and "Hypatia," and
"Hereward the Wake," with far more pleasure than their elders. They
hurry on with the adventures, and do not stop to ask what the moralisings
mean. They forgive the humour of Kingsley because it is well meant. They
get, in short, the real good of this really great and noble and manly and
blundering genius. They take pleasure in his love of strong men, gallant
fights, desperate encounters with human foes, with raging seas, with
pestilence, or in haunted forests. For in all that is good of his
talent--in his courage, his frank speech, his love of sport, his clear
eyes, his devotion to field and wood, river, moor, sea, and
storms--Kingsley is a boy. He has the brave, rather hasty, and not over
well-informed enthusiasm of sixteen, for persons and for causes.