s
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
him up, and quite impossible to choose the venerated Charles as a
substitute in my riper age. For here crops up a prejudice I find quite
ineradicable. To put it plainly, I cannot like Charles Kingsley. Those
who have had opportunity to study the deportment of a certain class
of Anglican divine at a foreign _table d'hote_ may perhaps understand
the antipathy. There was almost always a certain sleek offensiveness
about Charles Kingsley when he sat down to write. He had a knack of
using the most insolent language, and attributing the vilest motives
to all poor foreigners and Roman Catholics and other extra-parochial
folk, and would exhibit a pained and completely ludicrous surprise on
finding that he had hurt the feelings of these unhappy inferiors--a
kind of indignant wonder that Providence should have given them any
feelings to hurt. At length, encouraged by popular applause, this very
second-rate man attacked a very first-rate man. He attacked with every
advantage and with utter unscrupulousness; and the first-rate man
handled him; handled him gently, scrupulously, decisively; returned
him to his parish; and left him there, a trifle dazed, feeling his
muscles.

Charles and Henry.

Still, one may dislike the man and his books without thinking it
probable that his brother Henry will supersede him in the public
interest; nay, without thinking it right that he should. Dislike him
as you will, you must acknowledge that Charles Kingsley had a lyrical
gift that--to set all his novels aside--carries him well above Henry's
literary level. It is sufficient to say that Charles wrote "The
Pleasant Isle of Aves" and "When all the world is young, lad," and the
first two stanzas of "The Sands of Dee." Neither in prose nor in verse
could Henry come near such excellence. But we may go farther. Take the
novels of each, and, novel