vamped up from reading or
day-dreaming--and yet full of dreams, day and other, and full of
literature. Perhaps "the malt was a little above the meal," the yeast
present in more abundant quality than the substances for fermentation,
but there was no lack even of these.

[25] It is curious to compare this (dealing as it does largely
with sport) and the "Jorrocks" series of Robert Surtees
(1803-1864). Kingsley was nearly as practical a sportsman as
Surtees: but Surtees's characters and manners have the old
artificial-picaresque quality only.

_Hypatia_--which succeeded after some interval (1853) and when the
writer's Christian Socialist, Churchman-Chartist excitement had somewhat
clarified itself--is a more substantial, a more ambitious, but certainly
also an even more successful book. It has something of--and perhaps,
though in far transposed matter, owes something to--_Esmond_ in its
daring blend of old and new, and it falls short of that wonderful
creation. But it is almost a second to it: and, with plenty of faults,
is perhaps the only classical or semi-classical novel of much value in
English.

But it was in the next year, 1854, that Kingsley's work reached its
greatest perfection in the brilliant historical novel of _Westward Ho!_
where the glories of Elizabethan adventure and patriotism were treated
with a wonderful kindred enthusiasm, with admirable narrative faculty,
with a creation of character, suitable for the purpose, which is hardly
inferior to that of the greatest masters, and with an even enhanced and
certainly chastened exercise of the descriptive faculty above noticed.
The book to some extent invited--and Kingsley availed himself of the
opportunity in a far more than sufficient degree--that "coat-trailing"
which, as has been said, inevitably in its turn provokes "coat-treading":
and it has been abused from various quarters. But that it is one of
the very greatest of English novels next to the few supreme, impartial
and competent criticism will never hesitate to allow. Of his remaining
books of novel kind one was of the "eccentric" variety: the others,
though full of good things, were perhaps on the whole failures. The
first referred to (the second in order of appearance), _The Water
Babies_ (1863), is a half Rabelaisian though perfectly inoffensive
_fatrasie_ of all sorts of things, exceedingly delightful to fit tastes.
But _Two Tears Ago_ (1857), though containing some fine and ev