d incongruities
and "errors excepted," _Hypatia_ lives, moves, and speaks to us; and, in
the matter of vitality and interest, is amongst the very few successes in
historical romance in the whole Victorian literature.

_West-ward Ho!_ shares with _Hypatia_ the merit of being a successful
historical romance. It is free from many of the faults of _Hypatia_, it
is more mature, more carefully written. It is not laden with the
difficulties of _Hypatia_; it is only in part an historical romance at
all; the English scenery is placed in a country which Kingsley knew
perfectly and from boyhood; and the only controversy involved was the
interminable debate about Jesuit mendacity and Romanist priestcraft. So
that, if _Westward Ho!_ does not present us with the weaknesses and the
dilemmas of _Hypatia_, on the other hand it is not so brilliant or so
rich with interest. But it has real and lasting qualities. The Devon
coast scenery which Kingsley knew and loved, the West Indian and tropical
scenery, which he loved but did not know, are both painted with wonderful
force of imaginative colour. When one recalls all that Kingsley has done
in the landscape of romance,--Alexandria and the desert of the Nile, West
Indian jungles and rivers, Bideford Bay, his own heaths in _Yeast_, the
fever-dens of London in _Alton Locke_,--one is almost inclined to rank
him in this single gift of description as first of all the novelists
since Scott. Compared with the brilliancy and variety of Kingsley's
pictures of country, Bulwer's and Disraeli's are conventional; even those
of Dickens are but local; Thackeray and Trollope have no interest in
landscape at all; George Eliot's keen interest is not so spontaneous as
Kingsley's, and Charlotte Bronte's wonderful gift is strictly limited to
the narrow field of her own experience. But Kingsley, as a landscape
painter, can image to us other continents and many zones, and he carries
us to distant climates with astonishing force of reality.

_Two Years Ago_ has some vigorous scenes, but it has neither the merits
nor the defects of Kingsley in historical romance. Its scene is too near
for his fine imagination to work poetically, and it is too much of a
sermon and pamphlet to be worth a second, or a third reading; and as to
_Hereward the Wake_, I must confess to not having been able to complete
even a first reading, and that after sundry trials. Of Kingsley's
remaining fanciful pieces it is enough to say th