_Hypatia_ in early life will
fail to remember its chief scenes or its leading characters, if he lives
to old age. After forty years this romance has been cast into a drama
and placed upon the London stage, and it is frequently the subject of
some vigorous pictures.

In any estimate of _Hypatia_ as a romance, it is right to consider the
curious tangle of difficulties which Kingsley crowded into his task. It
was to be a realistic historical novel dated in an age of which the
public knew nothing, set in a country of which the author had no
experience, but which many of us know under wholly altered conditions.
It was to carry on controversies as to the older and the later types of
Christianity, as to Polytheism, Judaism, and Monotheism; it was to
confute Romanism, Scepticism, and German metaphysics; it was to denounce
celibacy and monasticism, to glorify muscular Christianity, to give
glowing pictures of Greek sensuousness and Roman rascality, and finally
to secure the apotheosis of Scandinavian heroism. And in spite of these
incongruous and incompatible aims, the story still remains a vivid and
fascinating tale. That makes it a real _tour de force_. It is true that
it has many of the faults of Bulwer, a certain staginess, melodramatic
soliloquies, careless incongruities, crude sensationalism--but withal, it
has some of the merits of Bulwer at his best, in _The Last Days of
Pompeii_, _Riensi_, _The Last of the Barons_,--the play of human passion
and adventure, intensity of reproduction however inaccurate in detail; it
has "go," intelligibility, memorability. The characters interest us, the
scenes amuse us, the pictures are not forgotten. The stately beauty of
Hypatia, the seductive fascination of Pelagia, the childlike nature of
Philammon, the subtle cynicism of Raphael Aben-Ezra, the mighty audacity
of the Goths, the fanaticism of Cyril, and the strange clash of three
elements of civilisation,--Graeco-Roman, Christian, Teutonic--give us
definite impressions, leave a permanent imprint on our thoughts. There
are extravagances, theatricalities, impossibilities enough. The Gothic
princes comport themselves like British seamen ashore in Suez or Bombay;
Raphael talks like young Lancelot Smith in _Yeast_; Hypatia is a Greek
Argemone; and Bishop Synesius is merely an African fifth-century Charles
Kingsley, what Sydney Smith called a "squarson," or compound of squire
and parson. Still, after all--bating grandiloquences an